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Your Internet users: working or surfing?
Are your employees surfing while they should be working? No, not donning wet suits and sneaking to the nearest beach; I mean accessing the Internet for personal reasons, like checking on sports or securities portfolios, playing games, checking out the Victoria's Secret website, or, most egregious, looking for another job!
The Internet is a wonderful way to gather information for business...or pleasure. Fortunately, there are two effective ways to check on and even block employee traffic on the web: disconnecting their browsers or installing software on PCs that not only reveals sites accessed and by whom, but can even block access to sites considered inappropriate by their employers. Software that blocks access to certain sites usually contains a database of sites that most businesses would deem inappropriate for the workplace and allow other sites to be blocked as the need may arise.
Disconnecting the browsers on workstations used by employees with no legitimate need to surf is a blunt solution.
For instance, Alpha Internet Services, Inc., a Houston-based firm that sets up local and wide-area networks, charges $125/hour for disconnecting browsers, according to president Bruce Rohde....