By now everyone knows that the public Internet is not always an appropriate place to hang out. In the early days of the World Wide Web my main concern with employee use was focused on discovering and eliminating malicious code such as viruses, worms and other insidious items from files, mail, mail attachments, etc.

While searching for viruses and the like is still a worthy pursuit, the world has gotten more complex, and employers have even more to worry about when protecting their assets. What's on the minds of many IT managers are the dangers inherent in "cyberslacking" - employees spending an inordinate amount of time online in nonproductive or irresponsible pursuits.

The problem is a lot more pervasive than workers sending out a few personal e-mails during the lunch hour. According to a recent Georgia Tech study, employees spend only 36 percent of their time on the Internet doing work-related activities. An IDC Research/Harris Interactive poll reports that the average employee spends more than 8.3 hours a week - a full workday - on non-work-related Internet use. Lost productivity related to Internet misuse at work easily runs into the tens of billions of dollars a year.

Unfortunately, wasted time is just one of the issues employers need to think about when it comes to cyberslacking. Consider that only about 16 percent of U.S. households have high-speed Internet access, whereas almost 60 percent of employees currently have high-speed Internet access in the workplace. Workers take advantage of high-speed connections at the office to download music files, video files and other broadband entertainment more frequently than they would at home.

Think of large numbers of employees running streaming applications for Internet radio, stock and news tickers. If you consider that streaming a 30-minute Webcast to be the equivalent of downloading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica onto a network, you begin to get an idea of how non-work-related use of bandwidth can slow company networks.

Then there are legal issues to consider. In the old days off-color jokes were confined to the water cooler or perhaps lewd pictures were duplicated on office Xerox machines. Nowadays, employees are logging onto Web sites that promote hate groups, pornography, gambling and other illegal or offensive activities.

Even a cursory look at X-rated material by an offended co-worker might result in an expensive lawsuit. When you consider that a single workplace lawsuit can costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, it's not difficult to comprehend how important it is to stem the flow of unwanted material into your office cubicles.

Finally, untrammeled use of the Web at work raises security issues. It was employee browsing of infected Web sites that unwittingly spread the Nimda worm from company Internet servers to outside computers. This is not unusual with blended viruses such as Nimda, because Web-based worms often are hidden on harmless Web sites that employees might visit daily.

What's the solution?

Business managers need to come to terms with their employees' abuse of the Internet and follow up by deploying some form of filtering, or as we say in the industry, "content inspection." After deciding to implement this technology, you need to define precisely what you hope to accomplish. Are your objectives to free bandwidth, protect information assets or monitor acceptable use? All of these entail slightly different technologies. Next time, we'll examine more closely what goes into content inspection and what you'll need to know before you deploy it.

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