Companies today that use the Internet have a whole new set of issues to concern themselves with. Many employees use the Internet to communicate with customers or need to perform their tasks online or with research from online sources. Providing these tools to your workforce may be necessary to help you do business.

Opening up the Internet to staff members can also create the potential for problems. Employees may use company resources to chat, do their personal errands, and communicate with their friends and so on. They may be forwarding jokes or receiving in Spam that can plague your network with unnecessary tasks. Opening the network to staff members may also create serious holes in your security and allow spammers and hackers direct access into your network. You need to fight proactively to ensure that your secrets and important data remain safe.

Not only do you need to protect your servers with Antivirus, firewalls and other security measures but you may also need to monitor the activities of each user or node within the network. You can do this with surveillance software that will report to you many pieces of important data. For a test run, you can download the evaluation copy of programs.

This program can run discreetly to tell you what your users are doing on the network. This can tell you who is productive and who is not. You can retrieve e-mails, websites visited, time logs for computer based activities and more. This can help you reward top performers and weed out the slackers. This can give you a bird's eye view into your employees? behavior patterns when they don't know you are looking. When the management is away, the staff members will often play. When you are out of the office, you want to know if your employees remain productive. When you set policies and procedures you may want to know for a fact that they are being followed. If you allow your employees a reasonable amount of latitude with respect to using the Internet, you may find it necessary to ensure that you are not being taken advantage of.

Companies today more than ever need to be proactive with their employees. With shrinking profit margins and accelerating business expenses, using an inexpensive program to find out where your resources are spent and who is providing you with the best return on your investment could save you considerably.