Today's Internet-savvy users are spending more and more time on their favorite social networking or using the latest hot new personal application. Stand-alone URL filtering solutions are insufficient control mechanisms because they are easily bypassed with:
Controlling user activity requires a multi-faceted approach that implements policies to control web activity and the applications that are commonly used to bypass traditional security mechanisms.
The solution... Next generation web filtering
This is a Feature level control allowing organisations to implement a range of policies that can help balance the use of personal or non-work related applications with the business and security risks associated with unauthorised file and data transfer.
This controls the flow of a wide range of file types by looking deep within the payload to identify the file type (as opposed to looking only at the file extension) to determine if the transfer of the file is allowed by policy.
File blocking by type can be implemented on a per application basis which can, for example, allow an organisation to enable the use of specific webmail application like Gmail and allow attachments, but block the transfer of specific file types.
This is a Feature level control over file transfer and provides another policy option that may help balance application use with policy control. Policies can be established to allow the use of an IM or webmail application but deny the use of the related file transfer function.
Rounding out the filtering features is the ability to identify and control the transfer of sensitive data patterns such as credit card numbers, social security numbers or custom data patterns in application content or attachments.
