Monitoring Technologies

Monitoring Technologies are used for many reasons throughout a company and come in many forms. These technologies can be used to monitor the IT infrastructure itself or they can be used to monitor what the employees are using the IT for. Employee monitoring technologies can benefit a company in many ways. For example, they can enhance employee productivity, help catch trade secrets leaving the company, protect the employees and business from sexual harassment, defamation or illegal activity lawsuits, and can help get a hold on network bandwidth consumption and storage space usage which helps with network capacity planning. This paper will be addressing employee monitoring and software related to that, such as REFOG and Spector 360 and it will also be looking at infrastructure monitoring software, specifically MonitorIT.

IT monitoring is prevalent in companies today; companies want to monitor the health of their system and network infrastructure in order to maintain reliable user functionality. It is essential to know the specifics regarding any performance related issues as they happen, to be able to minimize any potential network downtime. Depending on the type of business being supported, any downtime can be unacceptable. Providing a reliable end user experience hinges on maintaining the health of all servers and workstations, as well as any firewalls, routers, and/or switches included in a company's network.

Employee monitoring technologies have become more essential because of the huge increase in the use of computers in the workplace. According to research, the number of US companies that engage in electronic monitoring rose from 15% to 27% in just two years, and this number has been rising ever since. Furthermore, many companies have even acquired software that restricts access to sites that are considered unsuitable for employees. The legal reasons given by businesses for this close monitoring of their employees can range anywhere from protecting intellectual property and checking employee performance to enforcing company policies.

At some point personal calls and emails begin to replace the time for which an employer is paying someone to work. Also, unauthorized use of the Internet can steal not only minutes and hours, but bandwidth that should be spent on work. Monitoring can also discourage potential breaches in security and if there are breaches it can identify who committed the breach and find out exactly what information was given, allowing the employer to deal with the problem effectively. Employers have a legal responsibility to prevent harassment, discrimination, and other abuses of e-mail and the Internet. By monitoring electronics, employers are able to prevent costly lawsuits resulting from messages with inappropriate content.

The things that attract most attention in the work place are voice mail and email. An employee can write an e-mail then think better of it and delete