Six Reasons to Enforce Your Organization’s Web Security (by Casper Manes)

You know the Internet can be a dangerous place, full of threats to your systems and time sinks that users can spend hours in without even realizing it, but you may still be on the fence when it comes to whether or not you should do anything about it. Protecting your company and your users from the threats of unrestricted Internet access is a really easy thing to do, so if you are still trying to decide on this, here are six reasons why you should enforce your organization’s web security.

Technical issues

Technical issues usually come down to defending against malware. Whether the threats come from malware infected downloads, compromised websites serving infected media files, or phishing sites designed to steal your users’ credentials, you need to boost your organization’s web security.

1. Protect your company’s data Malware can corrupt or delete files, or provide attackers with ways into your network to steal your company’s secrets. You may not work with the secret formula for some flagship product, but your account records are important and your financial transactions are too. Malware can easily corrupt or delete spreadsheets, databases and presentations, and if your top sales person goes to your best customer to make a pitch and cannot open their slide deck, you’ll be lucky if the only thing you lose is your customer’s confidence. Avoid the threats to your company’s data by using web security software to scan every download and webpage for potential threats.

2. Protect your customer’s privacy
   Malware and phishing sites frequently try to set up ways into your systems to steal sensitive data about your customers. Contact records, credit card numbers, and other confidential data within your organization are all worth big money, and the company that fails to protect their customers’ data is very unlikely to see repeat business. A single compromise in your web security can cause lasting damage to your reputation. You can avoid these media spectacles by implementing web security software that can protect your users from accessing compromised web sites.

3. Maintain uptime
   Even relatively harmless infections can cause downtime. Whether you have to rebuild a workstation or an entire server, you are talking about hours of time wasted, and a single malware incident can cost you more than the price of your entire web security suite. The types of outages are avoidable by using web security software to protect your users and their systems from damage due to malware.
   

Employee issues

There is more to web security than just protecting against a virus. Employee issues can be much more damaging and pervasive, and can ultimately cost you far more than a workstation that crashed from a virus.

4. Hostile workplace There is a time and a place for most things, but when it comes to certain content online, the workplace is definitely not the place, and working hours are not the time for users to surf content that others might find objectionable. Employees exposed to objectionable content because they happened to look up and see something on another employee’s screen that is not work related is enough to cause you problems even the best HR professional won’t want to deal with. You can avoid these employee morale damaging events entirely by using web security software to implement a reasonable degree of control over what can and cannot be accessed while online.

5. Harassment
   If that content is adult in nature, and particularly objectionable, or when it is a supervisor who is accessing these sorts of sites and a subordinate who is offended, it’s not much of a reach for this to form the basis for a harassment complaint, which can damage teams, reduce morale, ruin careers, and involve costly lawyers and settlements. Avoid that sort of thing by using web security software to block access to mature content.

6. Lost productivity
   Even relatively innocuous and inoffensive sites can steal hours per day from your users’ productivity. A quick check of personal email, or a status update on a social network, can turn into an hour plus of lost productivity and the sad thing is the employee probably never meant or even realized that they were “gone” more than a few minutes. Personal use of the Internet is okay in moderation, and web security software helps you avoid lost productivity be enforcing reasonable time limits on recreational web surfing, and can also be used to review activities with users to help them correct their behaviours.
   

With these six reasons to enforce your organization’s web security, you can make the case for investing in strong and effective web security software for your environment. The costs of deploying a solution today are far less than the potential costs of not implementing web security, and the tangible benefits will make this one of the best decisions you ever made for securing your systems and protecting your users.

Author Profile: This guest post was provided by Casper Manes on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. Read more on what should be included in your web security strategy.