Securing Your Internet Resources
Productivity Loss
- Shopping, streaming media, webmail, IM chat, online gaming, fantasy leaguers, even day trading on the stock market… are few ways employees waste time and bandwidth at work. Each is a compelling reason for an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). An AUP sets an expectation, but it does nothing to enforce the policy and combat productivity loss.
- Lost productivity costs with non-business related surfing can be substantial even for a small organization. At minimum, an employee costing $50/hour (fully burdened incl. salary, health benefits, disability insurance, etc) and wasting just (1) hour a day - represents a $12K+ loss in productivity annually.
Legal Liability
- As internet-based threats grow, so has the risk of legal liability. It's no longer a game of controlling only one kind of communication (HTTP traffic). Now there are more ways to connect your employees with the world outside your network. It's given rise to growing legal concerns - enough to warrant state and federal legislation requiring compliance. St. Bernard's iPrism Web Filter Appliances provide a powerful and reliable way to protect your organization from both internal and external risks of liability.
- Access to offensive or illegal content, even if isolated, can precipitate costly and public lawsuits. Websites offering illegal or offensive content may deliver spyware or adware applications. Even if the offending user logs off, the machine can start delivering offensive pop-ups to other users who log in.
Security Breaches
Your network is open to security breaches via your Internet access unless you have a comprehensive solution in place. Here are examples of some of the threats your organization faces and how iPrism can help mitigate them:
Spyware, Malware, IM, P2P & Anonymizers are Potential Security Breaches
- Most state/federal compliance legislation mandates severe consequences for the failure to protect customers, patients, users, data, etc. All it takes is one key-logger to provide an outside entity with the login and password to your systems for your legal headaches to begin.
- Currently infected websites are now appearing at a rate of 6,000 per day, or every 14 seconds, and with ever-increasing sophistication in their methods of exploiting weaknesses in IT systems. Yet the vast majority of organizations remain unprotected.
- The surreptitious leaking of information through unwanted spyware and malware agents is a constant threat that is made easier for its propagators by unmanaged Internet access. iPrism Web Filter includes built-in Anti-virus that protects your organization from viruses before they can enter your network.
- The popularity of IM has made it an easy vehicle for the delivery of viruses, spyware, phishing scams and other malicious Internet-based threats. iPrism lets you block IM protocols completely and thus mitigate.
- iPrism protects against P2P which can deliver viruses, trojans, worms and spyware as well as provide a way for someone to export proprietary customer, product, and financial data -- P2P networking is clearly a security vulnerability that needs to be targeted.
- The prevalence of Anonymizer sites allow users to cloak their identity by accessing the internet through special sites that give them anonymity, and more importantly, attempt to subvert your acceptable use policy. The iPrism database includes thousands of anonymizer sites that you can block through a simple category check.
Why iPrism?
iPrism is a dedicated web content filtering appliance that allows you to effectively monitor, block and report on your Internet traffic to limit the amount of productivity loss form non business related web surfing, to protect your organization from legal liability associated with Internet access and to reduce the risk of security breaches via your Internet access in the form of Malware, Spyware, Malicious code and data leakage.
As a dedicated filtering appliance, iPrism is simple to install and configure, and requires little or no maintenance once it's up and running. Its ability to effectively monitor, block and report on your Internet traffic including HTTP, P2P and IM is why IDC recently ranked it the #1 choice among Web filtering appliances.
A couple of things that are specifically unique to iPrism Web Filtering compared to other solutions are:
-
iPrism is a comprehensive self-contained solution– No additional hardware or software needed
-
Proprietary kernel-level filtering gives you the speed of pass-by technology and the accuracy of pass-through – no one else has it
-
Comprehensive on-box reporting that reports by user name with our Active Directory Integration
-
Real Time Monitoring so you can quickly monitor traffic as it passes
-
Exclusive iGuard database is 100% human reviewed giving you unrivalled accuracy. With over 80 categories to choose to block or monitor, plus 9 custom categories you can use to create you own “block” or “allow” lists and specify for specific users.
-
Proxy Pattern Detection keeps employees from by-passing the iPrism’s filtering and blocks anonymous proxy sites on the fly
-
Flexible enforcement options to monitor or block by day, time, user, user groups, IP address and web categories
-
Ability for managers to quickly override blocked sites for temporary access
-
Protects precious bandwidth by limiting access to high bandwidth sites such as those offering downloadable MP3 files, chat, games, and instant messaging as well as bandwidth intensive services such as streaming media
-
No extra cost for IM, P2P and spyware blocking
-
No extra cost for our new multi-layered antivirus protects your network from malware/virus
iPrism Release – v6.0
The latest upgrade of v6.0 now includes AV/Malware scanning of web traffic to stop malicious attacks coming from web sites. Currently infected websites now appear at a rate of
6K per day, or every 14 seconds, with ever increasing sophistication in the methods of exploiting weaknesses in IT systems. Yet the vast majority of organizations remain unprotected. There is a recent article in NetworkWorld that makes an excellent point about the prevalence of malicious websites and the possibility of the “drive by download” & with iPrism 6.0 we will be able to mitigate that risk! You can access a copy of the article at:
Network World: Google Finds Evil All Over the World.