5 Reasons to Switch Your Web Filtering & Internet Monitoring Solutions
Are you not satisfied with your existing web filtering and internet monitoring solution?
The task of managing a company’s Internet usage policy can be a daunting task. You want to be able to restrict Internet access within the click of a few mouse buttons and run web activity reports that are easy to understand.
If your existing web filtering solution cannot provide that for you, you should start looking at alternative solutions.
Here is a list of pain points that you may be experiencing with your existing web filtering solution.
1. Your reports are overloaded with irrelevant URLs
Let me guess – your HR department asked you for a web activity report on a group of employees. You’ve sent them a report containing thousands of URLs. They come back to you with more questions than ever.
This is not normal. The web activity report that you sent them is not intuitive and doesn’t provide the information that they are looking for. It’s time to look for a solution with better reporting.
BrowseReporter will track only the URL that is on the address bar of the website your employee is visiting. In other words, if your user was on Facebook.com, it will only show Facebook.com on the final report – it’s not going to show irrelevant URLs such as fbcdn.net, upload.facebook.com, akamaihd.net and etc.
Furthermore, BrowseReporter offers 18 different reports. Each report represents specific datasets that your managers are interested in seeing. They are easy to understand. Check out a few sample employee Internet activity reports on this page to see which report fits your reporting needs.
Better yet, set up a profile to send web activities reports automatically to certain department managers at scheduled day and time. Email Reports are very easy to set up in BrowseReporter.
2. Your reports don’t tell you exactly how long your users have been browsing on the Internet
You’re looking at the web activity report in front of you. The only metrics that it gives you are “hits” or a “calculated time”.
At this point, you’re playing a guessing game. You’re going to guess how long your employees have been browsing on Facebook.com by the number of hits on the report.
With only this metric, you may not have the confidence to take action on your users’ Internet browsing history because you’re only “guessing” the time they spent on time-wasting websites.
BrowseReporter’s Active Time will give you the most accurate time tracked on the websites your employees visited.
Here’s how Active time works – it starts tracking when the user lands on a website. If they decide to minimize the browser window, open another tab or switch to another windows application, active time’s tracking will pause. It resumes tracking when the user returns to that same browser window.
This way, active time will only measure the time that your employees were actually paying attention to a website.
3. Your web filter doesn’t provide enough options to restrict Internet access
Internet usage policy needs to be flexible. Each user or computer many have their own unique Internet usage policy to determine which websites they can go to. You should never be stuck in a situation where you can’t restrict web access a certain way.
BrowseControl Web Filter gives you the ability to control your computers’ Internet access with ease. Here’s a list of features that BrowseControl provides:
- Control Internet based on computers or Windows users
- Allowed list and Blocked list
- Choose from 150 different categories to block from
- Block downloads of specific file types
- Block traffic from ports
- Scheduler different Internet restrictions at different time
- Set a daily Internet quota limit
- It even works when you take your laptop outside the network
4. Your web filter doesn’t let you block applications
Sometimes, blocking Internet access is not sufficient. Employees find ways to bypass the web filter. Most of the time, they use different browsers or applications to bypass restrictions. Having the ability to block windows application can help reduce this problem.
On the other hands, employees run application for non-work related tasks such as listening to online radio, watching movies, playing video games, chatting with friends, downloading torrents, installing software and much more. Without application restrictions, your network is opened to security threats.
BrowseControl’s App Blocker lets you block windows application from launching. It’s a simple yet powerful way to restrict unrelated windows applications from running.
Watch this one minute video to see how easy it is to set up BrowseControl’s App Blocker.
5. It’s too hard to deploy and configure your web filter.
You’ve devoted a team of technicians a large amount of time to buy all the appliances and set up the web filter for your company. When the web filter is not working, you have to spend more time and resource to get it fixed. The amount of money spent on hardware and labour is draining into your expenses.
CurrentWare web filter and Internet monitoring can be installed in minutes. Once installed, the CurrentWare Console provides a user friendly interface for configuring your Internet usage policy.
Lots of small businesses (such as lawyers, doctors, dentists, etc) use CurrentWare because they can install the software themselves.
CurrentWare web filter and Internet monitor offers a 14 day fully functional free trial.
