Escalating corporate bandwidth costs and falling network performance are two major problems that often have a common cause: staff using the Internet for non-work purposes.

Mercy Health & Aged Care, operators of 10 hospitals and aged care facilities throughout Victoria, found last year that Internet-related costs across its sites were rising rapidly, and staff were beginning to complain about poor network performance.

Utilising employee Internet management software Websense Enterprise, IT staff at Mercy discovered staff were using the Internet for non-work related activity to the tune of 30 GB per month - costing an estimated AU$40,000 per year in unnecessary bandwidth costs. Over the 10 sites Mercy has 750 Web-enabled employees.

"The monitoring aspect of [Websense] is really good," Simon Richardson, technical and communications manager at Mercy told ZDNet Australia  . "We plugged it in purely for the monitoring, initially."

In response, Mercy installed Websense Enterprise and Websense Premium Group III: Malicious Web sites database (PG III). This is basically a blacklist database of 3.9 million Web sites comprising 900 million Web pages sorted into 84 different categories, so the organisation can control what its staff is looking at online.

"It controls every aspect of your outbound traffic," said Richardson. Rather than become really heavy-handed with the censorship, Mercy decided to adopt a staged approach. Beginning with 'questionable' material such as pornography, Mercy added Web-mail services such as Hotmail because staff were infecting the network with viruses through it, and streaming media and music download sites, which were the main sites causing bandwidth issues.

PG III allows several ways of dealing with problems, according to Richardson, such as allowing access to certain sites or categories for a limited amount of time each week, rather than blocking access altogether.

According to Richardson, staff are appreciative of the move. "People really appreciate being able to access Web sites quickly when they need to for work," he said. "Much more so than being able to listen to TripleM over the Internet, for example."

Richardson said most staff couldn't get around the blacklist. "Only people in IT, using proxy servers to jump past it," he said. "We can detect when that happens, so it's not an issue. We can block from the firewall if we need to, and they're not hurting us yet."

Initially, many staff were disappointed at not being able to use Hotmail, and Richardson suggest if a company is thinking of implementing a strategy to control Internet access the staff should be warned beforehand.

"Without enough notification...people do get upset," said Richardson. "Let everyone know what you're doing and why you're doing it."

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