Do your employees use your computers, communications equipment and ISP account to browse the web and send email?  If they do, you need to develop and enforce an Internet Usage Policy that makes it clear to your employees that the computers and communcations gear belong to the employer and are to be used for work-related purposes.  This is important for several reasons:

Legal

• An employer can be held liable when an employee uses the employer's Internet access and intranet facilities to infringe third-party rights, harass, threaten, or for further unlawful purposes. By providing a clear Internet Usage Policy, you will provide guidance to your employees and reduce inappropriate employee Internet uses—uses that might expose you, the employer, to liability.
  
  
• If you have an Internet Usage Policy and an employee does something prohibited by the policy -- for example, transmits copyrighted software without the permission of the copyright owner, or uses the company email system to sexually harass another employee -- you may reduce your liability as an employer for that employee's prohibited activities.
  
  
• When you implement email and Internet-use monitoring of your employees, you should inform your employees of this monitoring and get their consent to protect yourself from breach of privacy claims by the employees.  A written Internet Usage Policy serves this purpose.
  

Security

• Malware is often hidden on legitimate websites that have been compromised.  Recent research by Google suggests that 70% of web-based malware infections originate from legitimate sites. 
  
  
• Malware infection can do more than simply slow down or disable your computers.  Keyloggers, for example, can reveal usernames, passwords, account numbers and other sensitive information.  Rouge FTP software can turn your computers into "storage lockers"  for pornography, movies and music, or pirated software -- this one hurts twice because it chews up network bandwidth as well.  Infected systems can also be used as launch points for attacks on other systems.
  

Financial

• When employees spend their time on Facebook,  monitoring their Ebay auctions, or catching up on the latest episode of "Lost", they're not spending it doing their job and it's costing you money.
  
  
• If your internet bandwidth is largely consumed by non-work related traffic -- streaming music, streaming video, downloading movies or software -- legitimate business traffic will be slowed and, perhaps, you'll be forced to purchase more bandwidth than you really need. Either way, it's costing you money.
  
  

JC Kelly Microsolutions can help you draft an Acceptable Use Policy for inclusion in your Employee Manual and we can provide tools to enforce and report on complance with the policy.

Contact us for more information.