Employee Monitoring Software: Why Do We Need Them?

“Unsecure Wireless Networks, Webmail, and Instant Messengers used at work are increasing the cases of confidential data transfer.”

While reading a morning daily, a catchy headline came to my notice. Headline with bold letters read “XXX Company Employee behind the Bars for Confidential Data Transfer”. It was a call center where all this happened and data worth lacks got transferred via email, IM chats and other portable devices. Fortunately, company could trace out the employee emails and employee was handed over to police. Such cases happen when there is improper investigative techniques followed by companies or there is leniency in supervisory measures by the company.

Here we can blame the human supervisory activities but also cannot deny that a supervisor has its own limitations and cannot monitor every employee for his activities either by standing behind or constantly taking rounds of the work area. Human element is always unsecure in such events. Companies employ several techniques to restrict transfer of confidential data and misuse of the official working hours, some include blocking of emails exceeding of certain size, blocking specific websites, no internet access and many other, but still employees manage to cross these settings and gain access to such restrictions.

With many of my friends in IT field, I have heard them saying that some website was blocked in their office but now they have gained access to that by modifying some settings. Employees with advanced knowledge easily perform such activities and also help others to access restrictions. An employee monitoring software proves its usefulness here, as it eliminates dependency on level of human supervisory and promotes invisible monitoring efficiently.

With such news headlines making their place in daily newspapers give birth to many questions like, can an employer trust employees for their loyalty?, is your data secure, how much privacy do employees have at work place?, how can an employer save confidential data from getting transferred to wrong hands? And many more..

Employee monitoring in past several years has taken a roar and is continuously practiced by employers for the security of their data. But we still face employee sabotages and transfer of confidential data. One of the available software ranges for employee monitoring are Chily Employee Monitor Software and Chily Computer Monitor - useful utilities to tackle such situations.

Let us analyze the major factors which lead to implementation of employee monitoring software at workplace.

Webmail: Email service providers like Gmail, Yahoo mail, and Reddif mail etc are constantly used by employees to transfer corporate information amongst themselves, but while transferring important data they forget that they are using a third party server to transfer their confidential data which can be accessed by anyone who subpoenas it from these email service providers . As a result the corporate secrets also get saved on the third party server which can prove harmful as you cannot rely on treatment of your confidential data by any other party.

Instant Messengers: IM Chats are used to talk and send confidential data as the transfer process is easy and enables large file size transfers. But doing it instantly also creates insecurity for confidential corporate data. Similar to webmail transfer instant messaging also promotes data leakages and employee sabotages.

Companies Themselves: Companies themselves are the open source for confidential data transfer. They make unrealistic demands without providing secure measures to the employees. As transfer of data through webmail is concerned, companies can easily maintain their own webmail server and ban use of public mail servers to transfer data.

Much prevention has been taken to control employee sabotages and transfer of confidential data but still cases happen and then an organization becomes cautious. How good it would be if these preventions are taken before hand and your data gets secure rather than going to wrong hands. Such cases give rise to incidents like we read or hear in news. To prevent such cases employers need to implement employee monitoring software to monitor employees at work which help them in every aspect of desktop monitoring, application monitoring, keystroke monitoring, screen capturing, internet activity monitoring, and much more.

“Promoting data safe world is as good as providing your family a good living; here Business is your FAMILY.”