Battling ‘cyber-slackers’ at work

Dec. 8 - Recent studies report 36 percent of workers use the Internet at work for personal reasons, businesses and government agencies lose an estimated $52 billion a year in lost productivity due to online games, and 13 percent of all workers believe the Internet makes it harder to focus on work. No wonder there’s a growing industry out there figuring out ways to keep cyberloafers away from the Web while at work.

Working for an Web site, I’m not too happy with the idea of blocking of sites. Someone might decide his or her workers or students shouldn’t see this MSNBC.com!

SOME OF THE recent survey results are potentially staggering. For instance:

According to monitoring reports, the top holiday retail sites currently visited by employees are: oldnavy.com, ashford.com, walmart.com, bloomingdales.com and zdnet.com;

70 percent of employees admit to viewing or sending adult-oriented e-mail at work (NFO Worldwide);

64 percent send some type of politically incorrect or offensive personal message while at work (American Management Association);

21.1 percent of all adult sites are accessed at work (Nielsen/NetRatings);

30.3 percent of workers say they use their boss’ Internet connection to look at sports sites (Center for Internet Studies);

Downloading audio and video can consume 50 to 60 percent of a company’s bandwidth;

One in five companies have disciplined employees for improper Internet usage (PC Magazine);

Of the Fortune 100 companies, 52 have an Acceptable Internet Use Policy (The Aberdeen Group);

Eighty-two percent of U.S. business executives believe Internet use should be monitored at their companies (Dataquest);

Thirty-one percent of employers say they restrict employee Internet/e-mail usage (Vault.com).

MONITORING THOUSANDS OF COMPUTERS

Monitoring and restricting is where 8e6 Technologies , an “Internet technology management company,” comes in. According to the company’s literature, 8e6’s X-Stop: “Offers a range of products for the business, education and ISP markets. Various versions of X-Stop focus on effectiveness and ease of implementation, but differ in their deployment methods to meet the diverse needs of customers. The X-Stop family of products includes the ‘Client version’ for the individual PC user, the ‘Server add-on software’ modules that reside on proxy or firewall servers; ‘R series hardware’ solutions for large-scale network systems and the ES2000 for prevention of non-work related e-mails and SPAM. X-Stop hardware servers provide significant benefits to large organizations and can monitor thousands of computers simultaneously.”

8e6 Technologies (formerly the Log-On Data Corporation) isn’t the only company out there helping businesses tackle the problem. But, according to 8e6, the difference between this company and its competition is traffic capacity. 8e6 solution currently handles 800 to 900 requests per second (roughly 80 Mgs of traffic).

The software solutions for individual computers, proxies and firewalls seem very straightforward: Your hardware, their blocking software. Businesses can configure them to their hearts’ content. 8e6 even provides a list of possible Web sites to block providing a good starting-off point.

The hardware solutions are a little more interesting. The R2000 is a complete plug-and-play Internet Access Management solution for companies designed to manage connections on an Ethernet network without interfering with the connection (as in proxy-based filters). It’s targeted to large or small businesses, ISPs and schools.

8e6's ES200 e-mail server. The company says it can be configured to remove junk e-mail and spam from your company's mail servers.

The ES2000 is the company’s server-based content management solution meant to help businesses and schools stop any e-mail abuse and spam problems. The ES2000 can be set up to provide a new “sub-domain” of filtered e-mail without affecting the mail e-mail server/addresses currently in use. And, if the ES2000 determines a piece of e-mail is spam, it’s archived for further review by the system administrator.

8e6’s most interesting product/solution appears to be its X-Stop Satellite system. Satellite allows companies to route Internet browsing (HTTP and FTP) requests to an off-site filter company, where all the necessary hardware and software is located. Satellite allows business managers to set customized filtering criteria by log-in name, including: denial of access to offensive Web sites and Newsgroups, plus denial of searches using specific words in search engines. All of this is done without installing new hardware of software on a company’s servers.

This technology doesn’t come cheap. Firewall and proxy server add-on software goes for $4,995. The R2000 server (handling 5,000 users) sells for $20,300 and the ES2000 server (for 1,000 users) costs $11,800. The Satellite service is $66 a month for 50 users, $132 a month for 100 users, and $330 monthly for 250 users. For more than 250 users, 8e6 recommends the R2000 server.

Working for a Web site, I’m not too happy about the idea of blocking of Web sites. Someone might decide his or her workers or students shouldn’t see MSNBC.com or some other site.

But,I do understand the need to keep certain material away from children. And I do realize that some workers abuse their speedy Internet access at work to handle personal chores — and the effect that could have on a businesses’ bottom line.

Until I read 8e6’s latest press release I never even thought about what effect the online holiday shopping season will have on businesses. With projected online seasonal sales increasing 71 percent, the amount of online shopping time is expected to skyrocket, too.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings Inc., 31 million people use the Web at work for an average of 23 hours each month. If each one of these users earns only $10 per hour and spends just one hour during the month of December shopping online or visiting holiday Web sites, the productivity loss would total $310 million.

8e6 says “shopping during business hours represents 3.5 percent of the daily workplace traffic, with the most popular times being 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Time spent online is expected to increase significantly now that the home stretch of the holiday shopping season has begun.”

8e6 says the exact same thing happened last year. The next month, in January 2000, the company received a flood of calls about their Internet access management products.