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

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? 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
1. 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.
2. Accidental Access
Due to its property, there exist a lot of Open source 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.
3. 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.
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 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.

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.

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