Proper management of employee Web use requires that all company stakeholders be provided with the best possible information on the Web activity of their Internet users. Specifically, the right information needs to get to the right people in the right format. This might be a challenge for companies for various reasons. One reason is that managers who may want to address productivity issues with employees, based on their Internet use or abuse, do not have the information in an easy-to-read and actionable format. They may not even have reporting access to their department’s Web activity whether through data visualizations such as charts, e-mailed reports, or a manager portal.

Another reason is that if there is reporting on Web traffic in the organization, it may be inadequate in showing relevant human behavior in the workplace. That is to say, almost all Web-use reporting tools provide information at the computer transaction level, not the user activity level. Hits and requests are computer-to-computer connections, i.e., all the hits/requests made when a user clicks a link. Your IT or network person is interested in computer-to-computer or computer-to-server communication, i.e., hits, requests, bytes, etc. Managers are interested in visits, time online, categories, and classifications and cannot read computer-level communication reports that don’t mean anything in terms of human action.

Without knowing the human behavior in the organization, management is unable to define what is normal and flag anomalies that may indicate insider threats, i.e., human actions that threaten data security. They are also unable to detect trends in workforce productivity or determine whether an employee is in compliance with corporate policy. In this article, I will cover what you should expect from your Web monitoring and filtering solution to get the most accurate, actionable Web-use information to all company stakeholders, i.e., senior managers, IT, HR, and department managers.

Company stakeholders or collaborators require specific Web-use data and need the right information to make decisions and take action. Reliable Web-use metrics are pertinent to the output of accurate Web-use information. Metrics allow you to analyze patterns of human behavior to detect inappropriate or excessive Internet use, address employee behavioral issues, and discover events that could lead to a data breach. In your Web monitoring and filtering tool, you should be able to get this data presented in easy-to-read visualizations such as reporting dashboards, charts, and detailed audit reports. The tool should also be able to serve dashboards, reports, and metrics from an easy-to-use portal.

All of these reporting visualizations provide several benefits for IT staff, administrators, managers, HR personnel, and other users. They can supply specific information to a specific audience in the company, increasing efficiency and productivity. They can be used for analysis of human behavior which allows companies to manage and control employee Internet use. They can be customized to offer different types of analyses for different users and therefore serve different purposes. And they comprise different reporting types such as Operational, Strategic, and Analytical reporting, allowing customized reporting of the data.

Operational reporting shows activity that is happening now and is based on real-time data. With real-time employee Web-use metrics, IT can monitor Web activity in real time as well as employee bandwidth consumption. The data is updated frequently. Operational reporting components are designed to be viewed multiple times during the day. Real-time employee Web-use metrics give a real-time running display of the browsing behavior of employees, i.e., current user activity, and identifies bandwidth hogs in real time.

Strategic reporting summarizes performance over set time frames, for example, last week or last month, and its individual visualizations, such as dashboard charts, are updated on a recurring basis at less frequent intervals. In relation to key performance indicators or metrics, Strategic reporting can show a snapshot of top consumer Web activity with interactive visualizations providing the details. This data may be of interest to IT staff, managers, and HR personnel. With these interactive visualizations, collaborators can quickly discover and track which users, categories, or sites had the most activity, how much time users are spending online, and so on. With drill-down capability, these charts can provide the details of user Web activity for audits and investigations.

Analytical reporting shows trends in data over time as well as comparisons of Web activity. This data may be of interest to managers and HR personnel. Its data visualizations may consist of trend and comparison charts as well as detailed audit reports, allowing collaborators to analyze large volumes of Web activity data for long-term audits and forensic investigations. Comparison charts allow collaborators to compare the Web traffic for a set date range with that of a previous period to detect any anomalies in Web activity. Analytical reporting also includes categorized, detailed audit reports that can deliver a comprehensive analysis of user activity including their visits, search terms, and inappropriate sites. They can be quickly run as ad hoc reports saving time in audits or investigations.

As mentioned earlier, your Web monitoring and filtering tool should be able to serve these data visualizations from a portal that is accessible to managers as well as an IT administrator. IT should be able to easily distribute reports manually or schedule reports for automatic distribution to managers as necessary. In the self-service portal, managers would be able to create reports on their authorized groups without assistance from IT and drill down to detailed user Web activity.

While reliable metrics are a critical part of Web-use data, your tool should also include a Smart Engine that feeds that data to the reporting components and provides analytics for determining human behavior because the raw data itself is only information about machine/network requests. It is not about human activity, but about the machine’s response to a human request to get or push information. In the next article, we will discuss Smart Engine analytics and its importance in deriving human behavior from Web-use data.

When it comes to a company’s Internet-connected network, the IT department or person is responsible for not only providing the right access to the Internet to employees, but keeping the company’s network and data secure. In order to do this, IT must invest time in examining the most suitable Web filtering and monitoring solution for the organization and implement it. Besides deploying firewalls, network security equipment, and data loss prevention tools to keep hackers out, IT also needs to keep all company stakeholders informed about the latest tactics being used by hackers to trick employees and compromise security measures put in place. In this article, I will cover why collaboration and input from others as well as the need for research and implementation of the right security equipment are important in managing employee Web use effectively in the organization.

Today, the biggest security threats are not from firewall breaches, but from trusted internal employees who are getting tricked into doing the wrong things, compromising all the well-planned and expensive security measures put in place by IT. To ensure productive and safe Internet access by all employees, actual usage needs to be monitored and controlled. IT needs to implement a reliable Web security tool that can monitor and report on Web use as well as control access to specific Web sites. This type of tool would help identify threats and attacks in the company’s network and also deliver accurate results in Web activity reporting. It would provide data that is easy to consume by all audiences in the company including department managers and HR personnel.

Another important IT task in managing employee Web use is granting the proper authorization to users and groups in the company. In so doing, IT can restrict access to Web sites based on need, to only sites that allow the employee to perform his/her job, or to only data associated with managers’ authorized users. With the right tool implemented, IT can also send easy-to-read reports directly to managers by manual distribution via e-mail or automatic distribution via scheduling. To make their job even easier, if the Web security tool includes a reporting-only access portal, IT, by only controlling portal access privileges, can grant self-service access to managers and HR, allowing them to run their own reports on their authorized groups without needing assistance.

As part of their role in employee Web-use management, IT must collaborate with all company stakeholders, i.e., senior managers, Legal, HR, and department managers. When IT is looking for an appropriate tool for these collaborators to use, it is important that the tool includes a Smart Engine that analyzes Web-use data in order to better interpret human behavior. The generated information can then be easily consumed by all including nontechnical personnel. IT would not need to massage or manipulate the data or be burdened by having to answer a lot of questions. The generated information would be best presented in easy-to-read, manager-ready, drill-down reports that give more detail on employees’ Web traffic. As part of this collaboration, IT should share pertinent information with HR and management when the Web filtering and monitoring product reveals patterns of inappropriate use. In this way, HR and management can determine the appropriate action to be taken.

Cyber attacks are growing in prominence every day targeting small and large businesses. On average, more than 4,000 ransomware attacks have occurred daily since 2016. 1 in 131 e-mails contains malware. As the number of malware types and variants continues to grow and evolve to bypass your antivirus program and other levels of protection, it is necessary for your IT team to keep well-informed of the latest hacker exploits and attacks, and put in place a secure Web filtering and monitoring solution to detect and block malware and other online threats.

An IT administrator that is on top of how network criminals operate and their latest techniques needs to communicate with HR to adequately protect the network from intrusion. Prompt communication of hackers’ latest tactics that focus on exploiting employees will help HR formulate a proper training and informational program on how to identify and avoid these types of exploits. IT can help HR flush out what they need to be training employees on, i.e., what to do and what not to do on the Internet. This type of training will hopefully help reduce the likelihood that an employee will open a suspicious e-mail or click unsolicited attachments in an e-mail if opened, and help to better ideed or unknown sites. Are your employees being provided with this training

IT plays a fundamental role in the proper management of employee Web use. Every year, hackers come up with new ways to trick users into giving up sensitive data, revealing credentials to their accounts, or clicking links to malicious Web sites. It is imperative that IT take the time to thoroughly research and implement the right Web filtering and monitoring tool to protect employees and the company’s network. It is also critical that this tool includes a Smart Engine to analyze the technical data and provide the necessary information on human activity. IT also needs to communicate the latest hacker tricks and traps to all stakeholders in the company, including HR and management, so that the workforce can be properly trained. Collaboration, communication, and training are essential to an effective employee Web-use management program. In the next articles, we will delve into the requirements of an effective employee Web-use management program, the importance of creating a well-designed Acceptable Use Policy, and other topics related to employee Web-use management.

Please let me know your thoughts on and reactions to this article and my questions by adding a comment. What challenges does your IT department or person face in managing employee Internet use effectively? Is IT communicating security vulnerabilities and exploits to your HR personnel, managers, and other company stakeholders?