Summary

In a perfect world, you would simply tell your users what is and is not acceptable content, and you would never need to worry about it. You could tell your users not to download executables, and they wouldn t. Unfortunately, users don t tend to listen to us as much as we would like. To address this, you can implement content filtering on your network.

Internet content filtering provides the ability to very granularly control what kind of content will and will not be permitted in the environment. You can define which users can access what resources, even to the point of specifying when or how much of a resource they can access. In doing so, you can protect your company from litigation as a result of hostile work environment lawsuits, reduce productivity losses due to people browsing the Internet instead of working, and protect the company s network from external threats being passed in through the means of objectionable content. You can also report on the value of Internet content filtering by providing to management reports that demonstrate the tangible value content filtering provides by graphically demonstrating what content is being denied and what kind of content is being permitted. In addition, you can demonstrate what portion of bandwidth and, by extension, cost the permitted traffic represents.

In concert with Internet content filtering, you also need to implement e-mail content filtering. The most important e-mail content-filtering measure is to implement virus protection to ensure that e-mail “based viruses cannot threaten your organization. You also need to be able to filter and block certain attachments from being able to enter or exit your organization. Finally, you should implement content-filtering and spam-control measures to protect your organization.