Studies show that 60% of online shopping and 70% of internet pornography traffic occurs during normal business hours. It is wise to establish careful monitoring and control of internet usage at your business.

1: Lost Productivity

A small business with 50 employees with average costs of $20.00 per hour each = $1,000 per hour. If each employee wastes just 1 hour per week  on the internet, and not working  it costs $52,000 per year in lost productivity. That’s less than 15 minutes per day per employee. Some recreational use maybe ok, but within pre-approved limits, and times.

2: Malware and Viruses.

By not restricting  where employees may visit on the web, they may find themselves visiting compromised, and malicious websites. This can wreck havoc on your business.

3: Compliance Issues

Employees may be visiting personal webmail or files sharing sites, and downloading copyrighted material. If this is restricted by company policy, it shows a good faith effort on the companies part should litigation occur. Employees have been known to download competitors copyrighted material and bring about a lawsuit because of it.

 4: Big Costs to the IT Department

Bandwidth is expensive. Employees using peer to peer file sharing, streaming video and other bandwidth intensive services cause a huge hit to your resources.This doesn’t factor the hit to the performance of your network with the additional traffic.

5: Bad Behaviour

Unrestricted internet access can also lead to employees visiting adult websites, gambling and other undesirable websites. This could cause problems, including potential lawsuits should these be viewed, even accidentally by another employee.

6: Employees Looking Elsewhere

Many unhappy employees use their work hours to shop their resumes to competitors. They could also be transferring valuable data as well to services such as dropbox.

7: Monitoring The Internet May Make Your Business Safer

Actively monitoring your business internet usage may reveal some safety concerns. For example an employee searching for guns or workplace violence.

8: Monitoring Can Help Employees Can Improve Customer Service

Knowing that their internet usage is being monitored can help make employees more aware of customer privacy concerns. As they understand the company is taking measures to protect customers, the employee too will keep privacy and security in mind.

9: Monitoring Employees Can Benefit Employees

You can use the monitoring results to identify not only cyberslackers but also reward employees who are doing great work., and meeting performance goals.

10: Deter Cyber Crime

Your company data, employee and customer information must be protected. Without adequate safeguards in place, such as internet usage monitoring, unscrupulous  employees can commit various cyber crimes such as identity theft or worse.

In summary products such as GFI WebMonitor can help protect your business against lawsuits, crime, lost productivity and improve workplace safety and security. There simply isn’t an excuse not to implement internet monitoring today.