Managed Content Filtering
Web filtering is a feature that categorizes web pages based on their content and applies rules to decide if a user is allowed to view that page or not.
There are many reasons why a company should have web filtering. Employees who use the Internet for personal browsing while at work are spending personal time on company time. They are also using company resources – primarily bandwidth – to browse for personal reasons, hence reducing the resources available to other users who need the Internet to conduct business.
But probably the most important reason is that employers are required to maintain a work environment that is free of sexual, religious and political references. What would happen if an employee browses to a website with inappropriate content, and another employee sees it and complains? The company could incur legal and economic consequences for having allowed – or, at least, not having stopped – such behavior. Even if your company is small enough to not be subject to such legal obligations, it’s still a good idea to show initiative, rather than negligence, and preemptively block employees from browsing unsavory content.
Network Box offers a multilayered approach to web filtering, with two options:
- Our own award-winning content-filtering system, S-Scan
- WebSense, a content-filtering engine based on a categorization database covering more 10 million websites, in 70 languages, and spread across 200 countries; it categorizes websites in 54 categories, enabling very granular rules.
We also run the Google Safe Search and Safe Browsing database; this categorizes websites based on whether they contain threats or not. It is not intended to block a website for its intended content but to alert us if that website is known to contain malware, spyware, etc.
The whole Network Box web filtering system is very customizable; rules can be created based on user name, IP address, groups, time of the day, day of the week, URL category, groups of categories (filtersets), and even action – GET or POST. URLs can be recategorized, and new categories can be added as needed. The rules engine can be linked to your internal LDAP application protocol to read groups from it and apply rules based on your Active Directory groups. Other authentication engines are also supported. The system can be fully customized by the administrator through a web browser interface.
