What Does Business Consider Fair Web Use?

SYDNEY - Sept. 26, 2016 - PRLog -- Most organisations have a policy on what is acceptable Web use. In our experience Web restrictions range from almost total restriction to completely open. It is important to strike a balance between worker freedom and productivity. After all, use of the Web for personal use during work time is not that different from making personal phone calls.

How Do We Decide What Is Fair Web Use?

First, take a look at Web use and look at the most active websites. Using your Web logger of choice you'll be able to see what the top sites are that your users are visiting. Is it Social, News, Video streaming or work related?

Looking At URLs Alone Can Be Confusing

It makes more sense to be able to group URLs further. For example, Facebook uses many different URLs to deliver content. So looking at URLs alone may not give you the full picture. It is better if you can perform Deep Packet Inspection and group URLs by Application Layer. This way, all Facebook content is grouped as 'Facebook', and all YouTube content is grouped by 'YouTube'. This gives a much more accurate view of Web usage.

After looking at Sites with Deep Packet Inspection, You Should Then Group By Site Type

- News sites.

- Work related sites.

- YouTube.

- Facebook.

- LinkedIn.

- The rest (the leftovers).

Now We Have Grouped Sites, We Can Look At Total Usage

When we look at sites grouped in this fashion we can see at a glance how much bandwidth each type of Web traffic uses. If a business has a fairly open Web policy, it'll most likely be streaming video, such as YouTube.

After Grouping Sites And Looking At Usage It's Time To Block Access By Time Of Day.

Want to allow non-work related websites only during the lunch period? Easy with NetScope. We can set up a policy to allow all website traffic during lunch time periods. This is often a formal policy at organizations but it's not actually enforced. With NetScope you can enforce time based Web browsing rules.

For Example: Allow access to all sites between 12pm and 2pm during each work day

With This Level Of Control Any Web Policy Is Easy To Implement

With NetScope any organization's Web policy is easy to implement. With NetScope you can limit Web in one of the following ways:

- Limit or Block Websites by time of day.

- Limit or Block Social Media.

- Protect Work Related Websites with Packet Shaping (QoS).

- Allow Web Access To Certain Subnet Groups.

NetScope gives you control over all aspects of your Internet and WAN  activity. It is not limited to Web traffic, but this is a good example of the flexibility and power of NetScopes filtering technology.

Would You Like To Control Your Web Access?

https://netscope.com.au/download