Are you Ready for Cyber Monday?

by Ian Holt

With nearly every retailer from Costco to Amazon advertising Cyber Monday, when do you suppose busy employees will get their online shopping done? In 2002 a survey of 2000 US companies nationwide found that half of all employees with online access planned to do holiday shopping from their company computer. We suspect that number has grown over the years as one third of those employees volunteered that they would knowingly violate their company’s Internet use policy prohibiting shopping at work. Another 20 percent of online employees had no idea if their company had a policy or not. And this was before the term "Cyber Monday" was even advertised!

Since the enterprise reaches into the employees personal time, the employee may feel justified in extending his or her personal life into the enterprise. Activities like online shopping, vacation planning, gaming, personal e-mail and social media are considered quid pro quo by the employee.

Your company's Internet Use Policy must be flexible enough to coincide with actual behavior and the flexibility needed to manage your workforce. Something with configurable time controls would allow you to easily restrict the days and hours during which users can access the Internet. You can also allow free access with or without monitoring during specified time periods so shoppers can shop away on Cyber Monday at lunch or after work.

QeH2 can help your company create a company Internet Usage Policy that fits your actual internet usage.

Internet Usage Monitoring

Presented by Ian Holt

According to Computerworld, Internet Monitoring has become a bigger part of IT support professional's job responsibilities. The magazine reports of a typical company spending one full day per week reviewing web logs to see if there's any activity that needs to be exposed or discussed.

A comprehensive reporting module is a must-have with any employee Internet management solution. The reporting modules purpose is to synthesize raw data and turn it into information that can be easily understood and used by managers to manage their employees. The amount of time and labor cost a user spends at sports related Web sites is an example of an informative report.

The number of violations to your organizations Internet Acceptable Use Policy is another. Reports should provide information graphically and numerically and should be able to be scheduled to be run and distributed automatically. Advanced features like report customization and distributed reporting can also be beneficial.

The last thing you want is for your IT support staff to babysit an employee Internet control system and become the Internet police. Your employee Internet monitoring solution should be easy to configure, automatically maintain its list of Web Filters, update itself with new program patches and automatically generate and distribute reports to managers and key stakeholders.