Taming the Elephant

Advice 2010-01-11 14:26

Andrew Millington, MD of Exclaimer Image Analyzer believes it is essential to put in place a tool that not only

With one in five men admitting to accessing porn at work, organisations know they are sitting on a potential time bomb. While accessing porn is not illegal — unless it is explicit — the risks associated with brand damage and employee harassment litigation are significant.

Companies and individual executives can also face criminal prosecution if employees are found using the company’s IT infrastructure to distribute porn, or they fail to prevent employees from downloading child pornography into the workplace.

If organisations want to reduce the security risk associated with employee access to porn it is essential to be able to identify those images and videos that contain pornographic material. However, given the incidence of pornographic material within the business, organisations also need a way of managing this problem without requiring face to face employee confrontation or expensive HR reviews.

And this is key: organisations do not want to lose good, productive employees as a result of their misuse of the corporate network. Instead, they are looking for a solution that reduces the prevalence of porn and reinforces the acceptable usage policy without the need for reviews, punishments or fines.

Automated Solution
This non confrontational approach can be achieved by using an email monitoring tool that will not only monitor activity but can also be set to automatically respond to the activity in a variety of ways. These range from simply blocking the image to automatically informing both sender and recipient(s) that the acceptable usage policy has been breached, with the email including the relevant policy clause.

With this approach, organisations have no need to mention porn or even inappropriate material within the email warning – the users will know what was contained in the image. By demonstrating an awareness of the activity and a willingness to take action, the organisation will rapidly see a reduction in the abuse of the network in this way as employees change behaviour.

Critically, there is no need for uncomfortable discussions or punitive activity. The business has the information required to take the steps it deems appropriate to address this behaviour and, with real time monitoring in place, can demonstrate it has taken all reasonable steps to create a harmonious workplace and safeguard employees.

Conclusion
The merging of the home/office world is complete. From personal emails to social networking and downloading porn, individuals will continue to exploit the corporate network for personal use if they can. And the problem can only get worse if left unaddressed.

Few organisations would expect to ban porn. Instead, they can leverage technology to ensure that employees recognise the difference between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour in the work place; and gently enforce the acceptable usage policy to mitigate the business risks associated with the existence of pornographic material on the network. Critically, it is about leveraging a dispassionate technology solution to achieve a non confrontational approach to imposing control over the corporate environment.

By automating the identification of material and notification of the relevant employees, organisations can take control of this serious security issue. With the right tools in place, organisations can meet the duty of care to employees by taking every possible step to minimise unwanted exposure to this material either through malicious intent or humour, drive down the volume of activity on the corporate network and, critically, safeguard brand value.