A quality employee Internet control solution should provide a high level of flexibility. It should be flexible in terms of the environments in which it will work and it should be flexible in allowing you to set access privileges that are directly in line with your Internet Acceptable Use Policy. For instance, suppose your company culture and your AUP are such that you would like to permit unmonitored, online shopping on the Web during lunch hours and after 6 pm. Your employee internet management solution should include time controls that allow you to sync your AUP with your actual Internet access restrictions.

You should also consider the environment in which your employees work today and you anticipate they may work in the future. Does your company provide flexibility in allowing users to work from home? If it doesn’t, chances are it eventually will. Telecommuting has been shown to lead to increased employee retention and has been shown to lead to lower costs for the employee and for the employer. Do your company’s sales people and executives take laptops on the road? If telecommuters and road warriors are part of your company’s landscape, you will want the flexibility of having the same rules that govern Internet access while employees are at the office to apply while the employee is using your company’s computer on the road or at home. It is a common misconception that it is not possible to monitor and control Internet access of machines that are not on your network; this is not the case.

Another key requirement for your employee Internet management evaluation is that Internet monitoring be reported by the employee’s login name and not just on the machine name or ID that accessed the ‘Net. A comprehensive Internet management solution will integrate with your company’s existing directory system in such a way that new user logins and groupings need not be created in order to define and implement Internet usage rules. For example, suppose you would like employees in your shipping department to have Web access to fedex.com and ups.com and not have access to e-mail, chat, IM, etc. For the sake of this example, your IT administrator has already set up a group called “Shipping Employees” in your company’s directory system. The employee Internet management solution should allow you to apply your new Internet policy directly to the Shipping Employees group so that when employees in your shipping department login, the new policy is seamlessly applied.

Lastly, your employee Internet management solution should not be tied to a specific piece of hardware. For instance, there are solutions in which you can plug in a basic Web Filter database to an existing network choke point like a firewall. Your network, for the most part, is a living entity. It changes with changing requirements and performance expectations. When you tie your employee Internet control solution to an existing network component, that component becomes rigid and more difficult to change or upgrade.