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Content Security ? Blocking Spam and Unwanted Web Traffic
The Internet and e-mail have stimulated huge productivity gains for employees. Workers quickly and easily access volumes of research on the Web and correspond with a mouse click. Unfortunately, businesses taking advantage of these tools are increasingly faced with daily onslaughts of spam and unwanted Web traffic.
Spam generated $20.5 billion in corporate losses worldwide in 2003 and is expected to cost enterprises $198 billion in losses by 2007 (The Radicati Group Inc. 2003). Inappropriate Web usage by employees also generates significant costs in lost productivity and legal liability ? not to mention the impact on the bottom line. Around the world, organizations are turning to content security technology to block spam and unwanted Web traffic, or simply put ? to keep the bad stuff out.
Roughly broken into two main categories ? content filtering and anti-spam ? content security ensures that non-business content doesn't slow employee productivity, expose the organization to legal liability and usurp needed bandwidth. Content security also keeps unwanted or offensive content such as pornography and hate mail from entering the network.
The statistics driving organizations to adopt content security are staggering:
- One-third of all e-mails are spam. In three years, this figure will grow to 50 percent (IDC).
- One-third of all employees write up to 10 personal e-mail messages per day while at the office (Vault).
- 30-40 percent of all employees' Internet activity has nothing to do with their jobs (IDC).
- 70 percent of Web traffic to porn sites occurs between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. (SexTracker).
According to IDC, demand for content security will exceed $1.5 billion in 2006, representing the fastest-growing sector of the information security market. For enterprises, content filtering and anti-spam are part of the larger battle to combat all kinds of online threats, including viruses, worms and hackers. In response, Internet Security Systems (ISS), an established world leader in security, offers Proventia? all-in-one protection appliances to block a full spectrum of threats all at once. Proventia stops spam, unwanted Web content, viruses, worms and hackers. With a built-in firewall and flexible subscriptions for anti-spam, content-filtering, anti-virus, intrusion prevention and Virtual Private Networking (VPN), Proventia offers best-of-breed security technology in a flexible and convenient format. Proventia customers can enjoy the simplicity of a security appliance while easily selecting the type of protection that best meets their needs.
Focusing solely on content security capabilities, ISS' Proventia all-in-one protection appliances automatically block more spam and unwanted Web content than any other product available. ISS' world-leading content security technology is also available from a stand-alone appliance. Proventia's content security offering combines intelligent content analysis techniques, the world's largest Web and image database and robust research infrastructure to deliver the best protection from spam and unwanted Web content.
Proventia Content Filtering Technology
Content filtering allows enterprises to configure and manage Internet access across the entire organization. The technology blocks unwanted Web content (pornography, gambling and shopping Web sites), ensures effective implementation of Internet access policies and enforces user guidelines. With the right content filtering solution in place, businesses can increase employee productivity, reduce legal liability and avoid unnecessary bandwidth use.
Proventia's content filtering offers multiple features, including performance restrictions according to user, group, IP and machine address, time-based rules, warnings and complete blocking of Web sites.
Analyzing Content
A content filtering solution is only as good as the Web data it collects and analyzes. Proventia clearly leads the pack in content filtering with a database of more than 20 million categorized Web sites, four times as many as the closest competitor. All evaluated Web sites are classified into 58 categories such as eroticism, online shopping, illegal activities, etc. so that organizations can easily customize the Web content they want to block. With more than 2.6 billion individual Web pages evaluated, ISS' database is the largest and most up-to-date directory of its kind.
Crawling the Web
The Internet is a constantly-changing environment with new Web sites and pages added and altered all the time. Content filtering solutions must keep up with fluctuations on the Web to remain effective at blocking unwanted traffic. Proventia content filtering technology uses fully automated Web crawlers to gather and analyze new data on a continuous basis, adding more than 120 million Web pages per month to its database.
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