Protect your information
With users being able to access the internet, send and receive e-mail and browse the local network –often in an unstructured manner –it is more important than ever that users or employees are focused and productive and do not steal intellectual property. It is essential that access to information is managed and users are accountable for their actions.
Companies have a duty to protect their information and also the personal information of their customers. In many cases, there are simply not enough steps taken to protect against all possible eventualities. This duty has been extended from the age-old mention of a company’s fiduciary duty to run the business correctly to add additional steps in terms of good governance and responsibility.
To claim “we did not know what was happening” is unacceptable. Company directors are forced, through these new laws and good governance practices, to make sure they have preventative, quantitative and corrective steps in place to protect their organisation from risk. Non-compliance can have dire effects which include directors being held personally liable, or even jailed.
Many IT administrators and business managers lack the tools to know quickly and accurately what users are doing on an organisation’s computers and the network. Often little consideration has been given to providing solid management systems to ensure that the investment in technology delivers maximum benefit while mitigating risk.
Although most organisations focus solely on securing their networks from external threats with various types of firewall technology, many neglect to implement strategies to manage the internal risks in their network. It is now common knowledge that more than 70% of information security breaches originate internally.
Are your company and your customer’s secrets and confidential information safe, even from people within your own organisation and do you really know?
You must know what your people are accessing and whether they are using information correctly and for the correct purposes. You need to guard your information against sabotage and corporate theft. Do you have any idea if your data is leaving the organisation?
There are obvious gaps, and these gaps need to be urgently addressed and rectified. There are several packages on the market that will provide the necessary facilities to deal with these important issues. In this article I will discuss SystemSkan, software that I am most familiar with.
This software offers a practical approach in a simple, single solution. It is a fully integrated internal security and policy enforcement solution that can be deployed over small and large scale networks. It is an essential policy enforcement tool to manage networks, knowledge workers and to protect intellectual property. It also assists management to set the appropriate policy and provides enforcement which will protect company information, addressing all the questions raised above.
The solution is a total user management tool with the ability to view and record every user´s actions on the computer network, including internet and outgoing email attachments. Every user event is audited and can be controlled.
Unlike basic monitoring products which are purely reactive (i.e. providing a report once a breach of network policy has occurred), SystemSkan provides both reactive and proactive security features. Reactive security is provided through the web-based reporting module, while the proactive security is provided through the Permissions Manager which allows you to continuously and automatically screen all user activity and can be configured to prevent inappropriate activities or lock users PCs when policy is broken. This proactive functionality prevents policy breach before it occurs.
The Permissions Manager allows IT administrators to predefine a list of suitable applications, network information and websites that can be accessed by particular groups of users. For example, a certain user group may only be permitted to run common applications such as Microsoft Office and Outlook, and access a limited number of work related websites. Another user group may be able to access more applications, a larger list of web sites and a different set of network directories.
Simple restrictions on the use of removable media such as CD Rom or flash drives can help to greatly reduce the introduction of viruses and the removal of company data. Similarly, restricting access to unsecured web-based mailing (e.g. Hotmail and Yahoo) ensures that users are utilising the company email system in a manner that promotes professionalism and ensures that confidential information is not removed from site without authorisation or traceability.
The Notification Manager directs the administrator to suspicious activities. Once a suspicious activity has been identified, various automated actions including no action; warn the user of the activity; alert the administrator; close the application automatically, take a snapshot of the workstation’s screen; lock the workstation; or combinations of any of the aforementioned can be enabled.
Remote Administration provides total control over any number of remote computers without chewing up bandwidth or slowing down the network. This enables IT administrators to maximise their productivity without disturbing users. This module also provides a help desk facility with integrated messaging and remote launching of executables, web sites and applications.
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