The NHL hockey playoffs had just begun when our customers were already sharing colorful anecdotes with us about how our employee monitoring solution was helping them maintain a shutout on wasted time. There’s nothing wrong with being a hockey fan – heck, include us in that lot. But if you want to check the scores after work, that’s probably a better strategy than tweeting about your hero’s hat trick while you’re supposed to be productive at your desktop.
How much time do your employees spend actually working? Less than you might think – potentially, a lot less. In Britain, an urban myth caught on that a man had died at the office and none of his co-workers noticed while wandering by his cubicle until the fifth day. It wasn’t true – but the reason the story caught so much traction is that it was just so believable. It’s easy to imagine the anonymous cog of an employee being ignored as he literally rots at his desk – because workers are often disconnected not just from the work they’re doing, but from their own co-workers in the next line of cubicles.
Problem: Remote computers do not appear in the list in Activity Monitor or show up as offline (with red icons) or I can not connect to monitored computers
You provide a PC workstation for your employee to do actual work. How are they actually spending their time? Perhaps not all that surprisingly, Salary magazine reports that 69 percent of polled employees said they waste at least some time at work on a daily basis (even if a good portion of the other 31 percent just told the pollster what they wanted to hear, that’s bad enough). It’s not getting better, either. The problem is up 20 percent from last year.
The business world has never been more aware of the danger of insider intellectual property theft. Unfortunately, it has also never been more vulnerable. The vast majority of threats to IP come from the inside, thanks to employees who are either disgruntled or incompetent. We’ve known that for years – but the worst part is that plenty of enterprise-level companies aren’t even trying to stop it, as one CIO Insider report shows:
Sixty-one percent of respondents say they do not have the ability to deter an insider threat, 58 percent admit that they cannot detect an insider threat, and 75 percent say they cannot detail the human behavioral activities of such threats. Furthermore, six in 10 respondents say they are not adequately prepared to respond to insider threats.
The respondents? C-level executives. What that means is that a solid majority of big, supposedly reliable companies haven’t seriously thought about how to stop a threat that is far from a remote, unlikely hypothetical problem. That’s mind-blowing – particularly when computer monitoring software is such an effective, proven solution that’s been around for a long time.
