MedStar Health
Businesses today can not afford the negative impacts that can come along with employee abuse of corporate resources including the company network and connection to the Internet. Employee consumption of questionable material consumes precious network bandwidth and costs businesses thousands or even millions of dollars annually in lost productivity, and in some cases, can even result in investigation from state, local, or federal authorities. Litigation can be given rise to if employees don’t maintain an ethical code of conduct when entering into inter-personal conversation, business discussions, or other interaction. Customer or partner relationships can be permanently damaged or even severed due to an employee’s mishandling of sensitive situations through the dialogue they choose to leverage.
Ensuring acceptable use of corporate resources is of paramount importance to businesses today. Your business was built on a strong foundation of ethical behavior—one that facilitates productivity, openness, fair and honest treatment, and trust. Compromise of this foundation can lead to potentially disastrous results inside your organization, and may cause public awareness of negative internal affairs.
Risks to your corporate brand stemming from acceptable use can be manifest in a variety of ways:
- Transmitting illegal or illicit content
- Visiting websites with questionable material
- Exchanging dialogue of a harassing or violent nature
- Discussing controlled substances or their use
- Disgruntled communications
- Discrimination
Traditional solutions for security have little focus on acceptable use and would have little to no capability to proactively identify the situations listed above—let alone prevent them from happening. Solutions exist that examine the location of content that employees are attempting to access in effort to thwart visits to unapproved websites. Some solutions filter content transferred through the Internet gateway using well-known protocols. While these solutions provide some coverage for issues associated with acceptable use, they fall short in providing comprehensive coverage for the gamut of situations that could arise that compromise your business.
Reconnex provides solutions that help identify and prevent acceptable use situations. Reconnex has developed a high-performance, appliance-based information protection system that intelligently monitors and discovers information traversing the network and stored in information repositories to provide customers with real-time protection against acceptable use violations and a record of previous incidents.
To help customers meet acceptable use requirements, Reconnex enables customers to monitor network traffic for exchanges that violate acceptable use, including vulgarity, discrimination, illicit images, keywords, violence, and controlled substances. Complex analysis and matching techniques, including skintone analysis for image files, are leveraged to help you accurately identify incidents that violate your company’s code of ethical behavior and conduct. By providing this visibility, organizations can coach their employees on acceptable use to foster an environment of trust and productivity—while minimizing conflict and mitigating potentially disastrous publicly-disclosed investigations.
