IN THIS ISSUE

Save Money with Monitoring

Tech Tip

Otherwise Service

WAVECREST HOME

Greetings,

Keeping businesses productive has always been a priority, but even more so during these tough economic times. This is why in this issue we discuss how Wavecrest's Cyfin and CyBlock products can help save your organization money. They allow you to closely monitor employees' Internet use, so you ensure it is both productive and safe.

The tech tips in this issue cover configuration backup, a feature that offers help should you ever lose any configuration in your product, and setting up MSDE log files. Finally, if you haven't done so in the past, check out our Otherwise service. It can help you decrease your percentage of traffic in the "Other" category.

We trust you will find these articles interesting and helpful, and we hope you are having a wonderful 2009!

Best Regards,

The Wavecrest Team

Save Money with Internet Filtering and Monitoring

It has always been important to know that your company's resources are being used properly and to the best of their capability, and it has become even more important in this time of recession. Businesses want to ensure that their employees are being productive and not wasting the organization's time and resources.

Internet access is one of those resources that can easily be abused, costing an organization time and money. Internet filtering and/or monitoring with one of Wavecrest's Cyfin or CyBlock products can help preclude or drive down costs in at least four areas: productivity, bandwidth, legal liability and security.

1. Productivity

The average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per 8-hour workday, not including lunch and scheduled break-time (America Online and Salary.com survey, 2006).
The average administrative employee costs a company $37.84 per hour (including salary, overhead costs, benefits, payroll taxes, etc.) ---- United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics -- March 2008.
Lost productivity costs the company $75.68 per day per employee (2 hrs x $37.84).
Average employee works 240 days per year.
Yearly loss per employee is $18,163. (240 x $75.68)
Loss per 1000 employees is $18,163,200 per year.
Average cost for a Wavecrest Internet filtering or monitoring product with a 1000-employee license is $3,500 per year ($3.50 per user).

Conclusion: Cost of a Wavecrest license is less than two tenths of one percent of the cost of lost productivity. A well-communicated Web-use policy, coupled with an effective monitoring product, greatly increases productivity in the workplace.

2. Bandwidth

Reliable studies indicate that as much as 70% of a company's bandwidth is being consumed by non-productive pursuits. Activities such as online video, audio streaming, downloading movies or MP3's are especially damaging. For comparison, here are the relative sizes of several media files:

Media file	Size (kb)
Microsoft Word file with instructions on how to access email accounts	19
Image of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center	25
Photo from the September 2002 issue of Time Magazine	81
MP3 version of Metallica's hit song "Nothing Else Matters"	5,700
Episode of "The Simpsons"	25,000
Version of the video game "Tomb Raider"	203,000
Compressed version of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"	800,000

While difficult to quantify, it is quite clear that eliminating or significantly reducing bandwidth abuse can improve network performance and preclude or decelerate the need for organizations to support increased bandwidth use.

3. Legal Liability

Web-related legal costs typically result from employees visiting pornography sites. Many studies show this to be a serious problem. In fact, according to research by Nielsen Online in October 2008, one quarter of employees who use the Internet visit porn sites during the workday. Hits to porn sites are higher during office hours than at any other time of day, according to M.J. McMahon, publisher of AVN Online magazine, which tracks the adult video industry.

This type of activity puts the employer at serious risk of being sued by other workers who are offended or upset by being exposed to pornographic images. Such suits usually take the form of sexual harassment or hostile workplace litigation and can be very costly in terms of damage to reputation as well as legal costs.

4. Security

Studies show that approximately twenty percent of personal use of the Internet by employees involves activities that pose potential threats to employer network security. Examples include file sharing, the use of malicious code, spyware and more. Like bandwidth abuse, the associated costs are difficult to quantify, but such activities can easily result in network disruptions or slowdowns and/or loss or compromise of proprietary data; these all come with a cost.

Tech Tips: Configuration Backup and MSDE Log Files

Configuration Backup for All Wavecrest Products
If you are ever concerned about losing your configuration in your CyBlock or Cyfin product, there is no need to worry. The product creates a backup of the configuration files on a nightly basis in a folder called restore. This backup is stored in daily files for the past 30 days.

Therefore, if you ever lose any configuration for any reason, our technical support team can retrieve this data from you. Simply contact technical support for instructions on sending the proper information, and our team will extract the file and send it back to you. You can contact technical support by phone at 321-953-5351, ext. 4 or by email at support@wavecrest.net.

Setting Up MSDE Log Files for Cyfin Reporter and CyBlock ISA
When setting up the MSDE log files from a remote machine, you need to verify that port 1433 is open on the ISA Server machine in order for your Cyfin Reporter or CyBlock ISA product to access the SQL database correctly.

Improve Categorization with Otherwise

If you haven't taken advantage of our OtherWise program, now's a great time to start! What is OtherWise? It's an easy way for Cyfin and CyBlock customers to reduce the percentage of non-categorized (also known as "Other") Web sites in their reports.

To participate in OtherWise, simply run a Top Non-Categorized Sites report and email it to sites@wavecrest.net. Our list technicians will categorize the top sites on your report and add them to your list. There is no cost, and your report data is kept completely confidential.

Wavecrest Computing Blog

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