Intranet Journal
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Monitoring Internet Use by the Thousands
For employees with Internet access, a perfect world might allow them to use the Internet at work however they see fit. For employers in a perfect world, employees would use the Internet only for productive, work-related tasks. It's a shame the world isn't perfect.
The people at 8e6 Technologies have made a living because the Internet is a vast space with many dark edges — edges your employer would rather not have you exploring from the office. Orange, Calif.-based 8e6 got its start under the name X-Stop. In October of 1995, the company released its first product, a Web site and keyboard typing filter called X-Stop for Windows 3.1. It then turned its attention to the ISP market.
After a couple of name changes and a decision to target Fortune 1000 customers, the flagship product of 8e6 Technologies is its R2000 Internet Filtering Server, which uses a database of the Internet's aforementioned dark edges to keep employees from visiting sites they shouldn't be visiting. (There are reports that the government of Iraq uses the R2000 to limit how much of the Internet its citizens can access; 8e6 has repeatedly denied selling the software to Iraq.)
On Feb. 11, 8e6 released Enterprise Reporter 3.0 (ER 3.0), the newest version of its network reporting solution.
There are numerous reasons for firms to upgrade from filtering Internet content to reporting online activity, according to Paul Myer, president and COO of 8e6, including lost productivity, threats of litigation, network congestion and crime. The amount of data passing through networks is difficult to imagine, and companies now have to reconstuct that data in ways they never thought.
The main menu screen of the Enterprise Reporter 3.0 by 8e6 Technologies.
There are three common ways to go about reporting Internet activity: 1) the "as needed method" where the raw logs can be run when the data needs to be explored; 2) "canned" methods that tend to suffer from limited summaries of the data and a lack of details; and 3) data mining, which is the route 8e6 uses in the ER 3.0.
The advantages of using data mining to report is that it is flexible, allows pre-processing of data and it can report in almost real-time. On the other hand, it can present problems by taxing the server and by presenting scalability and multivendor-support issues.
The basis for the ER 3.0, according to 8e6 CTO David Salch, was to separate the data management from the data reporting. In other words, by putting the reporting capability in its own appliance, it is separate from the filter, firewall, proxy and caching functions. By running separately, 8e6 says the ER 3.0 saves network performance.
Using categories developed by 8e6 for its Filtering Server, the ER 3.0 breaks down Web sites into a number of categories. The company uses a database compiled by humans to make sure sites are properly classified.
To give you an idea of what the ER 3.0 can handle, its design was aided by the requirements of one 8e6 customer with 200,000 Internet users that wanted to keep its log files for six months to one year.