Is Employee Monitoring an Answer to Your Insider Threat Concerns?

Insider threats account for 64% of security breaches in modern business. Whether intentional or not, these attacks are costly, and besides losing time and money to fix the damage, your company’s reputation and clients will likely be lost as well.

Considering these statistics, it’s not uncommon to see a business owner who keeps thinking about the ways to prevent such breaches. Luckily, there are many tools today which can give another layer of security to your company’s data. One such tool is employee monitoring software.

Although it can be used for increasing productivity, it is a great asset in staying on top of potential threats.

How does Employee Monitoring help?

Think of your internal network or cloud as a warehouse. Now, you wouldn’t leave a warehouse unattended and unlocked all the time? So, why aren’t you monitoring your employees’ computer activities? In this scenario, tracking software serves as a sort of security camera in the warehouse. It’s supposed to prevent any intruders, or help you catch them.

The employee monitoring industry has come far. In the past few years, many different software options were developed, and they’re all made to help you put an end to insider threats.

Nowadays, the employee monitoring software allows you to set up alerts for when employees access a certain website or a part of the cloud they’re not supposed to. You can also set up these notifications based on keywords used in correspondence. What is more, the app can send you alerts even if someone downloads a lot of data from your servers.

In case of a breach, the app can help you pinpoint the exact cause of the incident, making it easier for you to control the damage. Additionally, some software solutions are equipped with data loss prevention features. You can use the software to detect unusual logins, file transfers or external drive usage.

Security Isn’t the Only Benefit

Even though we’ve talked a lot about the security employee monitoring brings, that’s not the only benefit of using such software. Depending on what kind of a solution you purchase, you can either get a security-focused product, or one that’s more productivity-focused.

The best-case scenario – you’ll get a mix of both and your company will prosper in many different ways.

Now, the productivity-focused monitoring tools track which software employees are using during working hours. You can label these as productive, unproductive or neutral, thus receiving a productivity report for each of your employees or teams.

Generally speaking, any company that uses monitoring software can expect to see a bump in productivity. This is because employees will try to look their best in front of their bosses. Additionally, they will be able to see how much time they’re actually wasting on social media and other unproductive activities, so they’ll organize their workload and workflow in a more effective way.

Wrap Up

Using computer monitoring software is a good way to add an extra layer of security to your organization. However, you should note that it’s not the only one. Employees should be educated constantly on the safe use of the internet and the company’s devices. Besides that, you should limit data access only to the people who actually need to see that data.

Also, you can always hire an IT security expert to come and test your current protocols, as well as to create improvement plans for your current cybersecurity measures.