Some Advantage and Disadvantages of Content Filtering Rituals you should know in 2016

Before Getting into the real matter, we first need to understand what basically a Content Filter is? Acontent filter is a set of programs that help a system administrator to achieve full control over theserver such that one can decide what content is acceptable for viewing and accessing and what isnot. 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 majorlyused by businesses and organization to block access non-work related websites including socialnetworking 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 ofpurposes in their own stream. The content filtering policy always comes into action when there exista large number of internet users in the network. Here, the system administrator's task is to prepare afiltering policy that can benefit employees, organization, home, and school by setting your networkin 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 youknow every coin has two phase, and the same applies for these software too. So it must bebeneficial to the system administrator or the user to understand all of these factors, and then preparethemselves 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 eachemployee easily tracking the work efficiency. But, if the same applies for a much large number ofusers, then it is not that much easy, thus, to monitor the online activity of every network user. In thatcase, users take advantage of the unrestricted environment and often get away with activities thathamper their productivity level. Thus to manage the best productive stage, Content filtering blocksand removes all these tempting websites and forces the user to be productive and focus on the tasksallocated.

2. Maintaining High Level Network Protection

This sound pretty common but yes it seems to be very important benefit or advantage of applying acontent filtering policy is that it blocks access to the websites that most likely may distributemalicious software, malicious program or virus that can have dramatic effects on your network andcan also lead to Productivity loss. Blocking or filtering such websites reduces the chance of a virusattack 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 liabilitybecause of excessive usage of internet within the organization. The web filtering software restrictsemployees from downloading copyrighted content like media files, music, videos, offensivematerials 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 anyoneusing the server and helps a lot in cost reduction. Businesses now-a-days all over the globe have ahigh-speed internet connection with good bandwidth. Thus making them go with the contentfiltering policy that blocks websites & activities such as streaming videos, blocking media players,blocking sites like YouTube, Vimeo and other file sharing services, system administrators cancontrol the bandwidth usage, thus limiting the bandwidth usage in much effective manner.

Disadvantages of Content Filtering

1. Non-Banned Sites

The Content filter software doesn't always ensure the perfect results. As a fact they mightsometimes block a website that is not the one that cause issues in the workplace. In that case boththe employees as well as the system administrators have to tweak in the filtering system every timeto view or access that particular website for work purpose.

2. Accidental Access

Due to its property, there exist a lot of Open source filter software that take screenshot on everystep taken by an employee violating on their policies. These screenshots are then used as evidencethat the employee violated an internet policy. But sometimes it impacts badly when an employeegoes through these websites only due to mistyping the URL or clicking an encrypted link thatredirects employee to a banned website.

3. Alternatives Methods

Due to the protection caused by the Companies and Organization. Therefore, to overcome thesepolicies, employees several time use alternative methods to access these banned websites. Most ofthe time, employees do find alternative ways to access those banned websites. But at certain pointsthese alternative methods result in making a harsh effect thus imposing greater security risks for thebusiness.

4. 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 websitesthat 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 contentfiltering may recognize xyz.com as a banned website today, but it might be possible that a websitewith name Uk-news may not be banned or is not recognized by this software.