Other benefits
Apart from avoiding legal liabilities, an important objective is to reduce the amount of bandwidth being consumed by non-business uses of the Internet.
Doing so can postpone the need for bandwidth upgrades, reduce volume charges, improve the performance and predictability of key business applications, and free up existing resources for new applications such as voice over IP (VoIP).
Jones pointed out that users in other countries tend not to face volume charges, but it is a significant issue here. Australian businesses can pay "a huge amount of money" for unauthorised use.
One customer (the local operation of a multinational company) purchased a single Packeteer PacketShaper for around AU$20,000 and based on its initial experience expects to save AU$650,000 per year in volume charges.
It turned out that the recreational use of the Internet was five times higher than the company had estimated, so it is tempting to speculate that a significant amount of staff time has also been redirected to company business.
"A lot of organisations think they've covered [usage levels] with firewall or proxy logs," says Barnard, but they probably only analyse the logs once a quarter and even then only examine a subset of the information. "The horse has already bolted then," he says, but "Internet Sheriff stops the horse from bolting." The same observation can be made about products that provide realtime analysis, such as WebSpy Live.
Gaining an understanding of the way bandwidth is being used is also high on Smith's list. It allows costs to be controlled, and packet-shaping technology can be applied "so access to applications is not limited by non-business activity chewing up bandwidth".
You don't necessarily need to install extra software for this phase of the process. Some network management products will collect the information you need.
For example, the Traffic Accountant module of Concord Communications' eHealth Suite "analyses traffic generated by nodes and applications to provide information that allows you to solve network problems, as well as understand how IT resources are being used," says Tony Edwards, product manager at distributor LAN Systems.
"The primary focus of the software is predicting faults, managing performance," he says, but it can report on the most active nodes, the protocols and applications being used, and the Web sites being visited.
Some tools--Internet Sheriff is just one example--can generate bill-back reports, allowing various departments or even individual users to be charged for Internet use. If managers don't like the figures they see each month, that can act as a trigger for changing the acceptable use policy.
Smith also points to the advantage of using e-mail--scanning technology to detect viruses in attachments before they reach the mail server, let alone individual PCs. A product that can scan for viruses and inappropriate content in a single pass is probably more efficient than having to treat the two classes separately.
i think that the cyberbludging special was helpful