Day after day, your office workers show up for work and turn on their PCs. They fire up a browser and head to the Internet to…do what? Get into your employee portal? Check on competitors' pricing? Buy a few songs on iTunes? Check last night's sports scores on ESPN.com? Download a few sexually explicit videos? How can you be sure what employees do with that high speed Internet access you provide for their business use?

Employers want to believe the best of their employees - that workers would not abuse the resources provided to them at company expense. Most workers do deserve that trust and use their own good judgment in not spending company time or resources to visit Web sites that aren't truly job related.

However, there are people who allow themselves to be distracted from work by spending too much time on inappropriate Web sites. Not only is this a productivity buster; it can also be a liability for your company. And, browsing of untrusted Web sites is a prime way to allow malware into your corporate network. For example, just one click on a porn site – even for the briefest peek – is a likely way to pick up a keystroke logger on the PC.

The 2005 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey from American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy Institute shows that two-thirds of the 526 responding U.S companies now use software to block access to inappropriate sites, and three-quarters of the companies monitor their workers' web usage. This is a growing trend; in 2001, just 27% of the companies blocked access to specific types of Web sites.

Managing what employees do on the Internet and which Web sites they visit is a prudent practice. It can reduce corporate liability and enhance network security. Employee Internet management should be a part of every company's policy on the use of electronic assets and communication tools.

ContentWatch offers an interesting Internet management tool called ContentProtect Professional. Unlike most Web filtering products that work by blacklisting specific URLs, ContentProtect uses a content analysis engine and your company ePolicy to analyze and categorize the content of a Web site requested by a user. If the content of the Web site appears to be inappropriate - based on the user's profile in your policy guidelines - the user will not be given access to the site.

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.