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Top 5 Reasons to Choose An Internet Filtering Appliance Over So

• Posted by Digital Zone November 21, 2022 Filed in Technology 6 views
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  The need for organizations to monitor and control Internet usage in the workplace ought to be an accepted fact of working in a cyber-connected world. Statistics indicating that 30 to 40 percent of Internet use in the workplace is unrelated to work issues should come as no surprise. Neither if the report that 90 percent of employee computers harbor as much as 30 spyware programs. In fact, studies indicate that companies may be incurring average costs of $5,000 annually per employee in lost productivity as a result of Internet abuse. Other data claim that around 72% of employees are downloading music and movies, eroding bandwidth and leaving networks open to spyware and other malicious agents.

  As these dramatic statistics show, the necessity for organizations to manage their Access to the internet should be described as a baseline requirement. But how can organizations pick from the wide range of filters available in their mind? Perhaps one of many first decisions they will to make is between a software-based filtering solution and dedicated filtering appliance.

  Both appliance and software-based options offer standard functionality -- they monitor Internet activity, block site access, automatically enforce corporate Acceptable Usage Policy guidelines and report inappropriate behavior. However, upon closer examination, there are a few important and compelling reasons to decide on an appliance-based solution.

  An breakdown of the benefits of a product over appliance monitoring software when it comes to handling your organization's Access to the internet include these basic five categories:

  o Security

  o Stability

  o Accuracy & Reliability

  o Maintenance

  o TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)

  Because software-based filtering solutions must integrate along with your OS, you can't be sure that the complexity won't cause security and stability problems. Filters which are software-based can degrade performance simply because they share resources making use of their hosts and performance degradation can increase along with load. It's hard to scale a software-based filter because more users create increased loads on the host systems. A separate Internet filtering appliance uses pass-by technology to check website and IM requests against an inventory that's updated automatically. If the request matches a name on the list that's not allowed, a denial is sent back once again to the requester and no bandwidth is utilized.

  The dedicated resource of a product and its pass-by technology will prevent network slowdowns as well as single-points of failure on the system. The accuracy and reliability of an appliance-based Internet filter is maintained through fluid updates to the system. Software must 'check' every single request, making a bottleneck that it's a single point of failure. If the bottleneck becomes overwhelmed or crashes, no Internet traffic will have the ability to pass into or out of the company.

  With regards to time and cost, a passionate Internet filtering appliance requires less maintenance than the usual software-based filtering system. The database is maintained on the applying filtering device, where it can be updated automatically with new sites, protocols and even port activities in order to block port-hopping servers. Software filters require manual updates and again, require all traffic traveling through that certain single point of failure.

  The cost of maintaining both is measured by what each kind of service provides. While buying an Internet filtering appliance may possibly not be feasible for a tiny company with only a number of employees, software based programs are not scaled for handling large loads. The expense of failing software filters are more likely to impact a company's revenues than the investment within an Internet filtering appliance.

  The ultimate task of a Web filter is always to filter both incoming and outgoing Internet traffic. The Web filtering solution you select must manage to protect employees from visiting sites that do not match the Acceptable Usage Policy while also protecting the company from the financial, legal and security ramifications of employee Internet activity. An appliance-based Internet filter protects a company's assets, reputation, employees and their bandwidth in one package.