3 Key Reasons To Monitor Your Employee Computer Usage

Unless you monitor your employee computer usage, you are opening yourself and your business up to huge risks. In this day and age, computers and the internet are an essential part of doing business, but they are also a gateway for lost productivity, intellectual property theft and huge liabilities to your business. And considering that it's never been cheaper or easier to monitor your employee computer usage, it would be downright negligent not to do so. Here are the 3 key reasons to monitor your employee computer usage.

Key Reasons To Monitor Your Employee #1: Lost Productivity

You never know what your employees are up to on their computers when you are not looking, and these hours of lost productivity can cost your business tens of thousands of dollars a year. You are paying your employees to work, not to chat, play games or type personal emails, so you need to monitor your employee computer usage to ensure that such abusive behavior is not going on behind your back. When you identify the major culprits, you can then pull them aside and deal with them accordingly, as well as make an example for the rest of your employees of what not to do.

Key Reasons To Monitor Your Workers #2: Protect Business Assets

When your employees have access to your computers, they have the means of accessing all your business assets stored on that computer. That may include customer data, secret financial information and other proprietary secrets that you would not want to fall in to the wrong hands. That's why it's so critical to monitor your employee computer usage to ensure that they don't copy these assets onto their own portable drives or email them to your competitors. Otherwise you could potentially lose hundreds of thousands of dollars and see your business suffer irreparable damage.

Key Reasons To Monitor Your Employee #3: Malicious Software

When your employees visit certain sites, or receive personal emails, they potentially open their computers up to all kinds of malicious software. These malware programs have the potential of damaging your computer hardware, infecting your entire network and even stealing important data and information. The damage of such an attack is potentially huge and extremely costly, and it can easily be avoided simply when you monitor your workers computer use to ensure that they don't inadvertently visit a potentially damaging site or open a dangerous email file attachment.

Security Services and Training in Information Security and Computer Security

Many information security consulting firms offer security services and training, but it can be difficult for a client to differentiate between them, especially when lacking any background in the constantly-changing field of information security. The growing threat to computer systems and networks from outside attackers and insiders means that the need for information security services has never been higher. So what should you look for when considering which computer security company your organisation should hire?

To begin with, security services and training is an extremely wide field, and needs to be narrowed down to specific offerings. For example: what kind of services are priorities for your organisations' particular situation, and which others are "nice to have" but not immediately necessary?

In addition, what kind of training is needed by your particular staff in your particular situation? If it were possible to produce an off-the-shelf solution that would cover all situations, then someone would have marketed one by now. But in fact both information security services, and training services, need to be highly customised to the particular needs of the client. This means that your organisation will need to hire security services and training from a specialist information security company.

What should you look for when considering the offerings of competing firms? Having prioritised the computer security services your organisation requires, you should start with the following basic checks:

· Does the firm have a lot of experience in providing the given service (e.g. penetration testing, network monitoring, regular scanning, interim security management).

· What qualifications and professional memberships are held by the people who will carry out the work?

· If there is potential access to sensitive data, have the professionals involved been checked for a criminal record?

· What references can they supply from past clients for this kind of service?

Another question to ask is whether the firm is currently providing this service - the more clients it has for this service, the better. This is because the field of information security is changing so fast that skills can easily become out of date, unless there is ongoing involvement in a related project.

Training should not be viewed as an optional extra. Without appropriate training, all the security services and recommendations could be rendered useless. If a key staff member is unclear about how to proceed, or lacks the necessary information security training, then the money you have spent might well be wasted. The human aspect of computer security is often overlooked, yet it is this avenue that is responsible for a huge number of successful attacks in recent years.

In short, security services and training can offer real value to your organisation, but only if the information security consulting company is carefully selected, and only if staff training is included as part of the package.