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If you are IT administrator or security policy maker and also take charge with Big Brother planning for your company, you need take both legal and technological factors into considering. Below we will discuss each factor of employee monitoring.

Why monitor employees' network activities?
The reasons are simple; one is preventing any criminal or inappropriate actions which are really harmful for the company, second is cutting down the wasting time which your employees spent on non-related working.
Imagining that an employee downloads pornography onto a work computer that is displayed, intentionally or accidentally, to others, the company could be sued for sexual harassment. Much worse, if the employee downloads child porn, the company will have to face the criminal investigation; if the employee is embezzling money from customers' accounts, the company could be held to be negligent; if an employee uses company equipment to commit any criminal act, at the very least the company may end up having its computers confiscated for evidence.
Another fact is most employees waste large amounts of working time that are being spent on surfing non-related working websites, sending personal email or chatting with their buddies via IM software. Also some minor employees are downloading large files like movies and games from pirated website via peer to peer networks, which really takes up much company bandwidth and slow down the internet efficiency for legitimate users. And even worse, some employees visit some unsafe websites included virus, malware and hijack virus, which can result much serious consequence to your company network. Finally, employees may deliberately or inadvertently expose confidential company information to unauthorized persons through e-mail or chat.

Monitoring employees' email
Email is just like traditional mails with stamp, but sending email no required paper and pen any more, also it is much faster and securer.
Anyway emails are also hard to monitor relatively traditional mail, since it is encrypted and no physical shape. Employee monitoring software such as IMonitor EAM can capture and record sent and received email messages, which will storage all emails on the servers for later review and being proved evidence.
Monitoring employees' websites
Monitoring the website visited by employees, there are many ways to do like viewing the logs files of firewall generated or using some add-in products. But that is not enough to match the need of employee monitoring level. If you want much more detailed logs with comprehensive charts, employee monitoring software also is the best answer, which provides websites history by URL, by web title and by user and what websites have been visited more during the working time.

Seeing what they are chatting
Surveys show that employees have spent about more than one hour on chatting with their buddies. It will not slow down much obviously your company bandwidth, but it is an easy way to leak your company secrets to the public, even your rivals.
Fortunately employee monitoring software can deal with such case easily. Monitoring, blocking or managing, that is flexible you can choose to adopt for your company.

In summary
Considering so many pitfalls and threats to network security which employee have made in the working time, monitoring employees' activities is necessary for business. And the best solution which is not beyond your budget should be using employee monitoring software.
However if you're tasked with implementing a monitoring plan, be sure that the proper policies are in place first, and check into software packages and hardware devices that will make it easier to keep track of what your network users are doing and ensure that they're complying with both company policy and the law.

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