Before Getting into the real matter, we first need to understand what basically a Content Filter is? A content filter is a set of programs that help a system administrator to achieve full control over the server such that one can decide what content is acceptable for viewing and accessing and what is not. It helps in preventing people in the network from accessing certain types of material (content) on the internet either it’s for personal computer or the professional one. Content filters are majorly used by businesses and organization to block access non-work related websites including social networking websites, gaming websites, auction websites etc.
Apart from all these a content filter covers other platform apart from office and home. Now-a-days, each and every platform is enabled with several quality of content filtering software serving a lot of purposes in their own stream. The content filtering policy always comes into action when there exist a large number of internet users in the network. Here, the system administrator's task is to prepare a filtering policy that can benefit employees, organization, home, and school by setting your network in a number of ways depending on one's need.
Well, this covers mostly all the points, what content filtering is and how it is managed. But as you know every coin has two phase, and the same applies for these software too. So it must be beneficial to the system administrator or the user to understand all of these factors, and then prepare themselves for these software.
Advantages of Content Filtering
1. Increased Productivity Level:
When the number of employees or users in a network is small, it is easy to keep eye on each employee easily tracking the work efficiency. But, if the same applies for a much large number of users, then it is not that much easy, thus, to monitor the online activity of every network user. In that case, users take advantage of the unrestricted environment and often get away with activities that hamper their productivity level. Thus to manage the best productive stage, Content filtering blocks and removes all these tempting websites and forces the user to be productive and focus on the tasks allocated.
2. Maintaining High Level Network Protection
This sound pretty common but yes it seems to be very important benefit or advantage of applying a content filtering policy is that it blocks access to the websites that most likely may distribute malicious software, malicious program or virus that can have dramatic effects on your network and can also lead to Productivity loss. Blocking or filtering such websites reduces the chance of a virus attack thus making your network much more secure.
3. Prevention of Liability Issues
Corporates and big companies can now filter URL that may lead to drastic increase in liability because of excessive usage of internet within the organization. The web filtering software restricts employees from downloading copyrighted content like media files, music, videos, offensive materials or protected information that could expose the business to liabilities.
4. Limit Bandwidth usage
This can be termed as one of most important factors that generates a great advantage for anyone using the server and helps a lot in cost reduction. Businesses now-a-days all over the globe have a high-speed internet connection with good bandwidth. Thus making them go with the content filtering policy that blocks websites & activities such as streaming videos, blocking media players, blocking sites like YouTube, Vimeo and other file sharing services, system administrators can control the bandwidth usage, thus limiting the bandwidth usage in much effective manner.
Disadvantages of Content Filtering
Non-Banned Sites
The Content filter software doesn't always ensure the perfect results. As a fact they might sometimes block a website that is not the one that cause issues in the workplace. In that case both the employees as well as the system administrators have to tweak in the filtering system every time to view or access that particular website for work purpose.
Accidental Access
Due to its property, there exist a lot of content filter software that take screenshot on every step taken by an employee violating on their policies. These screenshots are then used as evidence that the employee violated an internet policy. But sometimes it impacts badly when an employee goes through these websites only due to mistyping the URL or clicking an encrypted link that redirects employee to a banned website.
Alternatives Methods
Due to the protection caused by the Companies and Organization. Therefore, to overcome these policies, employees several time use alternative methods to access these banned websites. Most of the time, employees do find alternative ways to access those banned websites. But at certain points these alternative methods result in making a harsh effect thus imposing greater security risks for the business.
Existence of large number of websites
As per the security policies survey an approx. 3 to 5 million new websites are created every week. So, it makes the system administrator's find it difficult to apply filtering over to these new websites that are created. Tracking and maintaining of these banned website is not an easy task every time. Thus its only possible to maintain a particular list only to be banned. For example, the content filtering may recognize xyz.com as a banned website today, but it might be possible that a website with name Uk-news may not be banned or is not recognized by this software.