We recently created a Twitter account to help keep you updated on product and industry developments. Tweets include updates on CyBlock and Cyfin’s latest product releases, technical and usage tips, and company and industry news on Internet usage issues that affect businesses and schools. This includes Internet-related news that addresses current bandwidth concerns, productivity losses, legal liability and security threats.
Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/WavecrestNet.
Bandwidth is a main concern for many businesses during this March Madness season. Many must deal with employees using company resources to enter online office pools, blog about the top seeds, and watch live streaming games that take place throughout March and early April.
In fact, CBSsports.com is expecting even more viewers online this year. They expect the number of unique viewers for March Madness on Demand, to rise 50% to 7.2 million viewers. With the massive number of sports Web sites and streaming games available, companies can expect to see a considerable drain on employee productivity and network bandwidth during the NCAA Tournament.
While you may or may not allow your employees to follow the games at work, you will want to ensure that it doesn’t interfere with your network. Wavecrest Computing offers Internet filtering by category or site, white list filtering, real-time web monitoring and detailed Web-use reports on a particular category or site and bandwidth usage. Some reports you can use to monitor bandwidth or access to sports sites are:
Source: https://www.marketingshift.com/2009/3/cbs-expects-7-millon-online.cfm
New versions of Wavecrest Computing’s CyBlock and Cyfin Internet filtering and monitoring software were recently released. Below is a list of some of the enhancements included in these versions.
For full release notes on the products, please visit the forum at https://forum.wavecrest.net/index.php. Current customers can download the latest release from their product by going to the Administration – Product Update screen.
With high unemployment rates and the potential of them rising even more, you would think that employees are doing whatever they can to be productive and keep their jobs. Instead, according to a study by Nielson Online in October 2008, visits to porn sites at work is up 23 percent from the previous year. This means that almost one quarter of employees are visiting porn sites during the workday. “Hits to porn sites are highest during office hours than at any other time of day,” according to M.J. McMahon, publisher of AVN Online magazine, which tracks the adult video industry.
Some analysts believe that it has to do with the declining economy and people looking for an escape, while others speculate that it has to do with a younger generation in the workforce that has grown up accepting porn as a part of life.
Regardless, porn surfing at work poses a major legal liability risk for businesses. This type of activity puts the employer at serious risk of being sued by other workers who are offended or upset by being exposed to pornographic images. Such suits usually take the form of ‘sexual harassment’ or ‘hostile workplace’ litigation and can be very costly in terms of damage to reputation as well as legal costs. In addition to the legal costs, businesses also have to be concerned about costs due to loss of productivity.
In fact, the Senate Finance Committee is investigating the misuse of NSF computers by government officials to view online pornographic material. In one instance, the report cites an NSF “senior official” who allegedly spent 20 percent of his work hours “viewing sexually explicit” Web sites. This amounts to a potential loss of $58,000 in employee compensation.
According to Salary.com, the average employee wastes 2.09 hours a day on the Internet. An average administrative employee costs a company $37.84 per hour according to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics. For a company with 1,000 employees, this amounts to over $18 million in productivity losses in a year.
A simple and cost-effective way employers can help ensure that employees use the Internet for productive purposes and not visit sites that pose a legal liability threat to the company is to filter and/or monitor Web access. Wavecrest Computing offers Internet filtering and monitoring products CyBlock and Cyfin, to fit any organization’s needs. The average cost for a Wavecrest product with a 1000-employee license is $3,500 per year. This is less than two tenths of one percent of the cost of lost productivity, making an Internet filtering or monitoring solution well worth the investment.
Sources:
https://www.newsweek.com/id/171279
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/01/28/grassley-launches-inquiry-widespread-porn-charges-nsf/
Before the end of the year, all of us at Wavecrest would like to wish all of our customers and readers a Happy Holiday and Happy New Year! We also wanted to leave you with one final product tip for the year.
If you are ever concerned about losing your configuration in your CyBlock or Cyfin product, there is no need to worry. A backup of the configuration files for your CyBlock or Cyfin product is created on a nightly basis in a folder called ‘restore’. This backup is stored in daily files for the past 30 days. Therefore, if you ever lose any configuration for any reason, our technical support team can retrieve this data from you. Simply contact technical support for instructions on sending the proper information, and they will extract the file and send it back to you.
You can contact technical support by phone at 321-953-5351, ext. 4 or by email at support@wavecrest.net.
Cyber Monday is just around the corner, and this year, almost 84 percent of online retailers are planning Cyber Monday promotions. Cyber Monday takes place the first Monday after Thanksgiving (December 1), i.e., the first day employees are back to work. Last year, Americans made hundreds of online purchases and spent $733 million on Cyber Monday.
This year will not be any different, and in fact, more shoppers will probably be looking for online deals on Cyber Monday. A survey conducted by BIGresearch found that 70 percent of young adults 18-34 with Internet access will shop at work.
Cyber Monday shopping and holiday shopping are huge productivity wasters for businesses. Wavecrest’s products can help you block online shopping at work. You can monitor and/or filter Web use with your Cyfin or CyBlock product by category, e.g., shopping, entertainment, sports, etc. Wavecrest’s CyBlock products also allow you to block Web access by hour so that you can allow employees to access shopping sites on their lunch break or after hours.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) recently renewed Cyfin Reporter for the seventh consecutive year. Cyfin Reporter enables the DOJ to conduct up to 100,000 employees’ Web usage simultaneously. The Department continues to use Cyfin Reporter because of its robust performance, accuracy and scalability and the many benefits it provides, i.e., improved productivity and decreases in bandwidth consumption, legal liability and security threats.
It’s important for employers to ensure that their employees are using the Internet in a productive manner and are not accessing sites that hurt productivity or degrade network performance. Cyfin Reporter helps organizations do this by providing actionable and accurate employee Web-use investigations. Its features include automatic abuse detection, interactive drill-down, and a report scheduler that runs and distributes reports automatically.
Dennis McCabe, Vice President of Business Development at Wavecrest Computing, states, “the great thing about Cyfin Reporter is that it not only allows organizations to monitor ‘bad’ sites, but it also allows them to monitor those sites that employees should be utilizing on a regular basis, e.g., the company’s Web site or intranet.” This is what makes Cyfin Reporter a truly effective tool for managing Web use.
For 12 years, Wavecrest Computing has been providing Internet filtering and monitoring solutions to business, government, and educational organizations worldwide. Wavecrest’s customer base includes well-known names such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, Procter and Gamble, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, Bridgestone, Mazda and many others. Government agencies and educational institutions can purchase Wavecrest products through GSA’s Federal Supply Schedule at a substantial discount.
The Wavecrest Computing product news system was introduced in September 2006 in CyBlock Version 5.5.3 and Cyfin Version 7.5.3. If you have one of these versions of CyBlock and Cyfin or later, you may notice that the icon below occasionally shows up in the right-hand corner of the browser interface indicating that you have new product news.
This icon will stay in the upper right-hand corner of the browser interface until you click on it to read your product news.
We send product news to let you know general and critical information about your product. Product news items are generally updates or things you need to know about the latest product release.
When viewing a news item, you will notice at the top that we indicate whether or not the news is Critical or Non-critical. Critical news is identified with a red bar, meaning that it is very important that you read the message and may require some action, while Non-critical news is identified with a green bar. A Non-critical message is typically a notification that there is a new release or update available for your product.
New versions of Wavecrest Computing’s CyBlock and Cyfin monitoring and filtering software were recently released. They include the following new features and enhancements.
For full release notes on the products, please visit the forum at https://forum.wavecrest.net/index.php. Current customers can download the latest release from their product by going to the Administration – Product Update screen.
The start of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games are right around the corner, and this year, NBC plans to stream 2,200 hours of live events on NBCOlympics.com. This may cause several network problems and productivity losses for businesses. To give you an idea of how much bandwidth a video can eat up, an episode of “The Simpsons” uses about 25,000 kb. This can cause major problems when you multiply that by several employees at one time.
Whether you’re concerned about productivity, bandwidth or both, your CyBlock or Cyfin application can be used to help you filter and/or track Web access the NBC Olympics site. The site https://www.nbcolympics.com is included in the category Sports but can also be filtered or monitored separately by placing it in a custom category if you don’t want to block the entire Sports category. Or, you can choose to just block video from the Web site by placing the URL https://www.nbcolympics.com/video/index.html in a custom category. Dont’ forget that you can also use the hourly blocking option if you want to allow employees access to the site during lunch and after hours.
To use custom categories, simply go to Advanced Settings – Category Setup – Edit URLs. Simply select the custom category you’d like to use, and type in the URL(s) you’d like to filter or monitor. For Cyfin users and those that decide to just monitor Web use of NBCOlympics.com, you can run a Category Audit Report on the Custom Category that you created to track that site.