Tag Archives: hr

Wavecrest Computing Releases Cyfin VPN Usage Reporting

Wavecrest Computing proudly announces the release of Cyfin’s new feature, VPN Usage Reporting. Cyfin is a leading employee Web-use analysis and reporting solution for a wide variety of gateway devices and log file formats.

Wavecrest, a global leader in employee Web-use management, monitoring, and analytics solutions, today announced the release of Cyfin’s newest feature, Virtual Private Network (VPN) Usage Reporting. VPN usage reporting supports today’s increased need to monitor remote employee Web-use while reducing the concern of extending enforcement of Acceptable Use Policies (AUP), managing productivity, and monitoring time online.

The new VPN usage feature adds the capabilities of monitoring the number of active sessions throughout the day, seeing when most people connect and disconnect, determining who has not connected recently, visibility into and responding to unexpected disconnections and excessive invalid login attempts or failures to connect, and more.

“Right now many businesses are in the state of flux, and may remain that way for some time,” notes Dennis McCabe, CEO of Wavecrest. “The remote and distributed workforce has always been part of Wavecrest’s focus, especially with our CyBlock product lines. Now, with VPN usage being an integral part of today’s business environment, we are excited to increase Cyfin’s features to satisfy even more of what customers look for when supporting their workforce. We know that continuing to advance our products allows businesses more freedom and flexibility to operate with any workforce distribution that they require, without having to worry about losing key visibility.”

Comprehensive yet easy to use, Cyfin’s customizable reporting capabilities supply audience-specific Web-use information with reliable metrics, easy-to-read reporting dashboards, manager-ready detailed audit reports, VPN usage reporting, IP segmenting, and more.

For more information, visit https://www.wavecrest.net.

About Us
With over 20 years of proven history Wavecrest provides reliable, accurate Web-use management, filtering, reporting, and analytics products worldwide across every industry. Managers, C-Suite, IT, HR, MSPs, Auditors, and more trust Wavecrest’s Cyfin and CyBlock products to easily decipher and manage real employee Web activity, gain visibility into the distributed workforce, reduce liability risks, improve productivity, save bandwidth, and control costs. Trusted by large government and commercial organizations such as US-CERT Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Justice, USPS Office of Inspector General, National Grid, Johns Hopkins, and a growing list of global enterprises and government agencies. We are a proud long-term GSA contract holder. For more information on the company, products, and partners, visit Wavecrest at www.wavecrest.net.

This year, allow your employees some freedom to watch March Madness!

Time to celebrate basketball!

One of basketball’s biggest events is here again. The past few months have been pretty emotional for fans. This may very well make this year’s March Madness even more focused and passionate for everyone. You can choose to let your employees catch up on results with maintaining the visibility, control, and security you need to keep your business running smoothly.

This year, Wavecrest Computing offers tips that you should know from past years but also some important new ones. Having customizable reports and the ability to see rollups of time spent online, we know these new tips will help you keep up with the changes in technology and streaming!

Let’s start with these new tips! We know seeing the real Web browsing activity should not be time-consuming and cumbersome: especially for busy managers, HR, legal, and yes, even IT. So, making sure the information is easy to understand is critical for your business all year but especially during a heavy Internet-use time.

  • Make sure your managers have access to see the info they need, when they need it, with their own restricted access. Manager Portal is a key component for business. 
  • Be sure you can customize reports for each manager so they can quickly and easily see their own employees’ Web usage without a lot of extra technical data. Customizable Report Templates and their drag-and-drop features makes life so much easier!
  • Roll it all up please! It’s important to know how much time is really spent on a web site. But with all the noise caused by ads, like buttons, share buttons, images, videos, and more…how do you know the real intentional activity you are looking for? Roll it all up under an understandable heading! Managers want to see activity for Facebook, ESPN, or NCAA! Tagging and rollup is the only thing that makes that available!

And of course, the tips you should already know to keep your business in good shape during this exciting time of year:

  • Not all ads or search results are real. March Madness search results or ads have been known for malware. Filtering, black/white listing, whatever way you choose. This is crucial!
  • Restrict sites that are inappropriate or illegal. Be aware of what your employees are doing online. Gambling sites are not just a legal issue but also tend to carry many security risks. Category filtering allows you to pick the whole category to block, the rest is taken care of.
  • Don’t let your bandwidth slow the rest of the business down. Make sure you are able to easily view and throttle current data usage for the entire enterprise, detect unexpected spikes that could indicate excessive data use, or just observe real-time updates. Throttling helps keep mission-critical business a priority, proactively.

The biggest tip for March Madness? Get your business set up with a Web-use management solution that will offer these tools all year long. Take it off your plate and breeze through the constant ups and downs of Internet usage. Shopping seasons, streaming seasons, current events…let them stay up to date without worrying about what it will do to your bottom line. Employees happy can easily outweigh the concerns during these times of more than usual Internet use. Be proactive… and let them celebrate.

Let us help.

This year, choose to allow your employees some freedom to watch and enjoy! Find out more about all the Web management product lines at Wavecrest Computing.

About Us

CyBlock® Employee Web Filtering and Monitoring Solutions provide advanced Web filtering, threat protection, comprehensive employee reporting, Smart Engine with machine-learning analytics, easy-to-use admin and manager portals, and more. Customers can easily configure CyBlock to monitor and manage compliance with their usage policies. CyBlock is available in various deployment options: CyBlock Virtual Appliance, CyBlock Appliance, CyBlock Mini Appliance, CyBlock Cloud, and CyBlock Hybrid.

Cyfin® provides advanced employee Web-use analysis and reporting for a wide variety of gateway devices and log file formats. Comprehensive yet easy to use, its customizable reporting and machine-learning analytics supply audience-specific Web-use information with reliable metrics, easy-to-read reporting dashboards, manager-ready detailed audit reports, and Smart Engine analytics. Cyfin is available in various deployment options: Cyfin Virtual Appliance and Cyfin Forensic.

Wavecrest has over 20 years of proven history of providing reliable, accurate Web-use management, filtering, reporting, and analytics products across various industries. IT specialists, business managers, HR professionals, Managed Service Providers, and Forensics Investigators trust Wavecrest’s Cyfin and CyBlock products to easily decipher and manage real employee Web activity, manage cloud services, reduce liability risks, improve productivity, save bandwidth, and control costs. Trusted by large government and commercial organizations such as US-CERT Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Justice, USPS Office of Inspector General, National Grid, Johns Hopkins, and a growing list of global enterprises and government agencies. We are a proud long-term GSA contract holder. For more information on the company, products, and partners, visit Wavecrest.

Requirements of an effective employee Web-use management program

Because managing employee Web use deals with humans and their actions, it is a continuous process for all sizes and types of businesses, where the goal is to ensure employees use Web access safely for productive, work-related purposes. To attain a high level of success, I believe that this process requires a Web-use management program be put in place that involves many key players in the organization, communication of the company’s Web-use policy, implementation of a reliable tool to monitor and control Web use, and other important activities. In this article, I will discuss the requirements of an effective employee Web-use management program and the activities involved that will bring about safe and productive Internet use by the workforce.

The key ingredient in an effective program is collaboration and communication among the various groups in the company, i.e., senior management, Legal department, IT personnel, HR personnel, department managers and supervisors, and employees. Communication would include IT keeping company stakeholders informed about current hacker threats, as well as HR apprising senior management of pertinent employee Web-use behavior. Collaboration would occur among HR, IT, and department managers in training the workforce. Collaboration would also take place between IT and department heads to select the appropriate Web monitoring and filtering tool.

If you don’t have one already, another necessity of a Web-use management program is to develop a sound Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) consistent with corporate culture. The AUP should describe acceptable and unacceptable Web-use behavior, i.e., company rules for what constitutes desirable, acceptable, unacceptable, and abusive use of the Internet and other network resources. The policy should also clearly state how compliance will be monitored and what the consequences will be to employees abusing the use of network resources. Does your company have an AUP in place that spells out the rules to your employees?

To ensure adherence to the Web-use policy, it should be clearly communicated to the entire workforce, including management, informing them of what is and what is not acceptable in easily understood language. You may also want to have employees acknowledge that they read and understood the policy through a signed acknowledgement. HR and management personnel should hold meetings with workgroups to answer questions and provide any additional information. This fosters open communication in the workplace and allows employees to be more engaged in proper Internet usage.

In addition to communicating the policy to all concerned, another requirement of an effective Web-use management program is training employees on how to use Web access productively and safely. Whether training is conducted or coordinated by HR or in collaboration with managers and other department personnel, training sessions should cover Internet usage and related subjects. Specifically, employees need to be made aware of what sites they are visiting and what they are clicking on the Web. The purpose of training should be to encourage proper, productive, and safe use of network resources while reinforcing the information in the AUP.

An important requirement of a Web-use management program is to use a reliable software tool that is designed specifically to monitor compliance with Web-use policies and proactively control Web access. The tool should also include a smart reporting engine that distinguishes between user clicks (visits) and unsolicited traffic (hits) and easily presents accurate and up-to-date Web-use data, identifying desirable Web usage as well as unacceptable use and trends. Does your tool include a Smart Engine that analyzes Web traffic to better interpret human behavior? Does it generate easy-to-read, manager-ready reports? Does it give details on employee Web use with drill-down reporting capability? These are key features of a Web monitoring and filtering tool that will benefit IT, HR, and department managers.

Another activity that is necessary is following up with corrective actions when inappropriate Web access is detected. With a policy in place, personnel oriented, the workforce trained, and your Web monitoring and filtering solution actively monitoring and controlling Web use, there are still more activities to do. The tool will inevitably reveal patterns of inappropriate use or disclose signs of outright abuse. These incidents will require attention by HR and management personnel. After identifying the problems, management can take appropriate follow-up actions, such as counseling employees, training or retraining workers, changing work processes, and revising or clarifying the AUP. Managers may also need to institute follow-up audits on individual users and, in worst case, take disciplinary action including termination.

The final element of an effective employee Web-use management program that I will cover involves the establishment of a continuous improvement process by the collaboration team, i.e., HR, IT, department managers, etc. In this process, there would be frequent reviews of employee Web use, new Web services introduced into the network, and new security threats, modifications of work processes, and appropriate revisions of the AUP. All company stakeholders would be involved. What other activities have been effective in your company in managing employee Web use?

Unauthorized Web use can degrade workforce productivity, impact network performance, threaten network security, and create legal liabilities. Any of these outcomes can seriously impact your bottom line. An effective employee Web-use management program is essential to prevent this from happening. If the responsibilities of an effective program are carried out well, misuse and abuse of network resources will be minimized without damaging workforce engagement and morale. Getting accurate, actionable information to all collaborators is a must, and the tool that you are using should be able to provide this information. Next time I will discuss how to get this information with reliable metrics generated by a reporting tool.

HR is best suited to bring all company stakeholders together to ensure safe and productive Internet access

employee Web-use management

My discussion here is about the suitability of HR being the hub for employee Web-use management where all company stakeholders are brought together to ensure safe and productive Internet use by all employees. For one, HR’s expertise typically includes personnel policy, codes of conduct, labor relations, workforce training, legal compliance issues, and workforce morale, all of which relate to the employee Web-use management issue. Because of their expertise in policy, training, and processes, HR is in the best position to coordinate the tasks of proposing and developing solutions to ensure that employee Web use is properly managed. After all, Web-use management is not just an IT issue. It is all about employee behavior, productivity, and morale. What Internet-use people issues are you seeing in your company? How are you solving them?

Communication is key in HR’s collaboration with managers, IT, and employees in the company. Starting at the top of the company, HR can educate senior managers on the importance of employee Web-use management, get their input, and keep them involved. By collaborating with IT whose access to highly accurate Web-use reporting and filtering tools can produce easy-to-consume Web activity data, HR can keep upper management apprised of pertinent employee Web behavior. This allows HR to contribute to the organization’s profitability and help keep the company out of severe legal difficulty–important business objectives for senior managers.

As the focal point in the employee Web-use management effort, HR can also schedule Web-use training programs for managers and employees, coordinating with Legal, IT, or department managers who observe a need or have the specific knowledge to train the workforce. Training could include instruction on the proper use of network resources, how to recognize a phishing e-mail message, how to detect malware symptoms, how to recognize and report other online threats, and other Web-use topics. Essentially, training would teach employees how to use Web access productively and safely. In this way, all areas of the company play an important role in proper network resources and policy training that would have a significant impact on corporate Web security. Are these types of training programs taking place in your company?

Another HR task would be to communicate the company’s Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) to the workforce by providing it in writing or electronically, requiring a signature to indicate acceptance of the policy. If you do not have a policy, HR, in collaboration with IT, Legal, and senior managers, would be well-suited to establish a sound AUP consistent with your company’s culture. Once the policy is created, HR can work with functional managers and IT to ensure optimum implementation of the policy. As Web activity is analyzed over time, HR can revise the policy as necessary. Managers and HR would work together to ensure employees are complying with the Web-use policy. Along with managers, HR would be involved in specific cases of policy noncompliance.

In communicating the policy to the workforce, HR would focus on promoting the interest of the company as a whole, while helping to maintain or improve employee morale. Managing employees’ use of Web-access resources is a sensitive and complex task, one that involves communicating with all groups–senior managers, managers, IT, and employees–and deals with policy, training, and continuous improvement processes. With HR as the hub, the continuous improvement process would involve the frequent review of employee Web use, new Web services introduced into the network, and new security threats, as well as modification of work processes and appropriate revision of the AUP.

All areas of the company can help manage employee Web use effectively. In the next articles, we will examine more closely IT’s role in employee Web-use management, the requirements of an effective Web-use management program, developing a sound AUP consistent with corporate culture, and other topics related to the human factor of data security.

Please let me know your thoughts on and reactions to this article and my questions by adding a comment. If HR is leading the Web-use management efforts in your business, in what other ways are they collaborating with others in the company?