MONITORING SOFTWARE BLOG

Workplace and employee monitoring are extremely common. However, many people believe that employee monitoring is illegal. This belief is understandable when you consider that there are a number of workplace privacy laws in place to restrict the invasiveness of employee monitoring. 

Employee monitoring, such as employee surveillance in the workplace and the use of employee monitoring software, is completely legal, but privacy laws will vary by jurisdiction. When you think of employee monitoring, know that it comes with its restrictions and that not all the myths that you’ve heard about it are true. 

While medical experts have long been predicting another pandemic, COVID-19 still came as quite a surprise. Few could have anticipated the nearly immediate global impact and company-wide and industry-wide lockdowns that followed. Overnight, projects and initiatives were put on hold as employees and IT teams focused on redirecting all workflows through remote access, while also ensuring that security remained a top priority. 

Any business managing a remote workforce could fall victim to a cyberattack either from external malicious attackers or from insider threats. Your remote workforce needs to be secure enough to protect your company assets even when a remote team is navigating in and out of company files on their own personal networks. 

From unprotected personal networks to lax security on a personal device, your remote workforce could be at risk and you would have no way of knowing. 

Monitoring employees in the workforce is necessary for your business’ survival. As your company grows, so too will the level of access to sensitive information, unknown people, and moving parts. You want to have employee monitoring in place early so that it can scale as your business grows. 

Employee monitoring might consist of monitoring at a physical location or using employee monitoring software. Depending on its uses, employee monitoring software in particular may seem too invasive and a form of computer spyware. 

Employee monitoring software and computer spyware are extremely different. And, in fact, employee monitoring may be able to help a company track and stop computer spyware before it’s too late. 

When you operate a business, you need to make sure all the t’s are crossed, and i’s are dotted. One aspect of running a business that often is neglected, especially for SMBs or newly minted enterprise businesses, is network monitoring. 

Every business should adopt some form of employee monitoring in order to ensure that their employees are working dutifully when they should be and when they say they are. Employee monitoring can also be a useful tool for monitoring, preventing, and mitigating insider threats. 

However, additional network monitoring should also be adopted in order to streamline business processes, cut costs, and provide security teams with a more in-depth look at activity across the network. 

If you have shifted to running a remote workforce due to the COVID-19 restrictions, you have most likely been dealing with the technological and security issues that can come with a remote workforce. 

Using a remote workforce for employees previously on-site can be beneficial, especially during a time when physical workplaces must be closed. But a remote workforce should not be run without optimal security protocols in place. It’s important to establish an insider threat detection program for your remote team. 

A successful insider threat can cause a lot of harm to a business of any size, costing a company thousands if not millions of dollars in lost assets, downtime, compromised customer assets, and expending resources to mitigate the breach. Therefore, businesses of all sizes should seek ways to mitigate insider threats, like an insider threat detection program, so that they can increase the chances of stopping one before it happens.

One method of managing an insider threat detection program is by using user and entity behavior analytics (UBA and EBA, or UEBA). These tools allow project managers, business owners, and management to track a user’s behavior, and, of course, the behavior patterns of an entity, to try to identify a sort of common pattern or trend. Therefore, when that trend is disrupted, those monitoring the users can potentially do something to protect their business against an insider threat.