BUSINESS CHALLENGE:

Securing sensitive corporate information

Monitoring of social media and online chats
Monitoring of unproductive Internet use
Using company machines for storing personal images and video

The company is one of the Far Easts largest shipping and logistics operations with an extensive
administration work force. Due to the volume of orders, the speed with which they can be processed is
extremely important to their delivery business. As such, productivity of the administration staff is
crucial to the profitability of the company. In order to tackle the issue of unproductive use, the company
had established extensive desktop and Internet use policies, which were signed by any employee joining
their work force. To enforce these policies, block unproductive sites and secure their information, the
company deployed various solutions including Trend Micro. However, there was no discernible increase
in productivity.
The companys sales staff used Skype and Facebook as a means of communicating with customers.
However, managers had no way of monitoring their use as Trend Micro could not monitor activities over
social media sites, chat applications, etc. or material being copied to thumb drives. It only served to
protect the company from outside threats such as hacking, viruses and malware but failed to detect
what people were actually doing in the office.
Due to the global nature of their business, the majority of their internal applications run over the
Internet. However, they experienced bandwidth bottlenecks during peak trading hours. In the past, the
company had consistently upgraded their bandwidth to address this problem but without any
satisfactory results.
To evaluate their desktop utilisation, the company decided to install e-Safe Compliance, initially on a
field trial basis.

THE SOLUTION: E-SAFE COMPLIANCE

The e-Safe Compliance proof of concept was installed in silent mode and produced surprising results:

1
Nearly 60% of Internet usage during working hours was of a personal nature and the majority of the
offenders were administration staff who were not required to use Facebook to perform their role.

2
Some administration staff were detected watching movies or playing games for more than 50% of their
PC usage time.

3
For the sales staff, who were required to use Facebook, e-Safe Compliance helped to identify numerous
instances of staff spending time playing Facebook games or just using it for personal purposes.

4
e-Safe Compliance detected various instances of inappropriate chat and corporate email conversations
with the customers, including the use of foul language, all of which could directly harm the reputation of
the company.

5
e-safe Compliance detected some staff copying emails containing customer information to thumb drives,
which was unusual activity, considering that the majority of the business is run over email, and this led
directly to an investigation by the management.

6
There was a high incidence of staff accessing unauthorised documents from file servers.

7
Some staff were detected accessing pornographic websites, images and videos. Trend Micro employed a
lists-based, URL blocking system, which was unable to block all permutations of pornographic websites
URL or detect offline pornographic images and videos. Employees had exploited this limitation but e-
Safe Compliance was able to identify the activities which were a serious breach of company policy.

8
e-safe Compliances Drive Audit facility detected huge numbers of personal videos and images being
stored on company machines; the top violator had nearly 500GB of video files in his 750GB hard drive.

BUSINESS BENEFITS:
The company decided to proceed with e-Safe Compliance and announced to all employees that their
machines will be monitored and that they should refrain from non-company related activities on
company machines during working hours unless specifically authorised by their managers.

1
e-safe Compliance provided the management with visibility of under-utilised staff across the entire
organization, by department and by individual user. Senior managers could now verify the requests
from department heads for more resources more accurately, and to solve the problem completely, they
employed a process of sending department heads regular desktop and Internet usage reports for each of
their staff. The department heads now had a clear idea about their staff utilisation and could take
appropriate action to improve productivity. This process also dramatically helped in reducing
unproductive use of the Internet, thereby minimizing the bandwidth issues at peak times.

2
The department-level reports produced by e-Safe Compliance also identify potential information leaks,
for example, via thumb drive etc, and enable managers to question the intent of the transfer of
information. This has helped in eliminating the information leaks within the organisation.

3
Personal use of Facebook and Skype by sales staff was drastically reduced as they know now they are
being monitored. Furthermore, with the knowledge that e-Safe Compliance is monitoring keystroke
activity, the incidences of inappropriate language between the staff and the companys customers in
email communication have been eliminated.

4
The issue of pornography was completely solved as people know now they would be caught accessing
such material whether from online or offline sources.

5
Monitoring compliance with the companys policies is now much more effective. Employees are only
allowed to store personal files in a specific folder on the PCs desktop, which is verified using e-Safe
Compliances Drive Audit features. The IT personnel can also manage and control the amount of
personal content allowed per employee using e-Safe. The downloading of media using the companys
Internet is a breach of existing IT policy and employees are personally held liable in the case that any of
the stored information is found to break any piracy laws. Through e-Safe Compliances ability to detect
and identify the violators, the company has managed to drastically reduce the amount of personal media
files has completely eliminated the use of companys Internet for personal downloads and uploads.