Having held the position of Information Technology Manager for real estate and hospital management in my last ten years of profession, I couldn’t help notice that providing Internet access to employees during working hours, severely affects their work output and productivity. Perhaps their attention has been more inclined towards the World Wide Web rather than their actual duties and responsibilities.
Moreover, such access to the web has become a security breach in terms of providing safety for confidential and important files that are critical references for reports and performance appraisal and monitoring of the company. Viruses, hackers and other harmful files and programs that can infect these files, not to mention the possibility of accessing and modifying them without notice due to lack of security, will evidently become a work hazard rather than a privilege given to employees and the company.
These incidents have led most companies to resort to ensuring that most corporate intranets and systems to be more security conscious. It is not really a matter of limiting access, but rather providing a screening point to which data flow can be checked and whether they can probably contaminate or cause harm to valued data. Control of Internet access provided to employees can be easily done through human program intervention, thus the real meat of the conflict lies on how effective the Management Information System of a company truly is.
Useful Articles Reference Links:
What You Should Know about Firewalls
Beginner’s Guides: Firewall Setup and Configuration
Originally posted on June 20, 2006 @ 7:19 am