Take Back Your Bandwidth
By Blake Britton, Vice President, Axxys

For businesses today the Internet has evolved from a being a convenience to have to a business necessity. The Internet delivers business critical applications, e-mail, and telephone conversations, while providing your company’s image to the general public. The Internet is also often accused of being the biggest productivity killer for a lot of businesses. The question: Is content filtering a necessity? Here are my three reasons why my answer is Yes!

Maximize bandwidth: For most businesses the big bandwidth hogs are the downloading of large files and the streaming of music. When either of these activities are occurring the Internet slows down for everyone. At NMGI we are constantly downloading files that are pertinent to troubleshooting issues or patching client hardware and/or software. If there were end users streaming video or music (usually Blake), then this would make our engineers battle for bandwidth. By limiting the content users can download or be streamed on the Internet bandwidth is then maximized for the entire business.

The Internet is a productivity killer to the undisciplined: It happens every late summer and fall, fantasy football, one of the biggest productivity killers for businesses kicks into full swing. The Internet is a double edged sword, a great source for business critical information along with and great information for personal use. There are a lot of businesses that do not constrain the Internet and trust the judgment of their employees. While this may be a great idea and a real morale boost for some employees; however, if productivity falls as a result of those fantasy leagues, a good content filtering will give you the ability to tighten parameters for a period of time or at least meter the amount of time spent on non- business related sites.

Protect your business: Not to beat a dead horse, but while the Internet has a lot of good content there are some pretty objectionable sites and material out there. Those of you not on the DoubleCheck email spam filtering solution or some other form of spam filtering software have probably seen some very objectionable site ads. In short, your business is responsible for protecting your users, employees and guests , from being exposed to material that other end users are viewing on the Internet. Imagine the horror of an employee walking into the office of another employee when they “accidentally” land on a objectionable site. Do you really want to deal with this issue? Content filtering can prevent the “accidental” browser from landing on such sites.

Ok, by now you are all asking: Where’s the sales pitch? Well here it is. NMGI offers several different forms of content filtering, the most popular and cost effective is the Web Blocker and Gateway Antivirus/Intrusion Prevention add on products from WatchGuard. The Web Blocker product offers up to 40 predefine categories to block and filter content while the Gateway Antivirus/IPS product offers the ability to block peer to peer programs (bandwidth killers such as Limewire).

Call Network Management Group at (620) 664-6000 and let’s discuss what you can do to reclaim your bandwidth and gain Internet operational control.