GFI WebMonitor 2012 released

GFI Software announced GFI WebMonitor 2012, with an array of new features – including a new user interface, “smart” dashboards, a built-in reporting engine and real-time alerts – that make all the data collected by the solution more accessible to stakeholders outside the IT department.

David Attard, product manager, GFI Software said: “Based on extensive customer feedback, we redesigned the WebMonitor user interface and incorporated new features that give a variety of different departments – not just IT – greater access to web monitoring information they can use to address their unique concerns.”

Using GFI WebMonitor’s smart dashboards, SMBs get a complete view of all web browsing activity happening within their organisation and can filter resulting information by categories, websites and users. Using these drill-down capabilities, different business audiences can obtain tailored information vital to their business function without being inundated with data they don’t need.

New dashboards include:

Activity dashboard – Provides information on employees’ browsing habits and surf time, including which employees breached corporate Internet policies, which websites are causing the highest productivity loss and which users may be browsing malicious websites.

Bandwidth dashboard – Equips IT administrators with current download and upload volumes as well as projected bandwidth costs and usage based on recent activity. Users can also identify which employees are consuming the most bandwidth and why, determine which websites are the most bandwidth-intensive and monitor bandwidth spikes and trends.

Real-time traffic dashboard – Monitors real-time connections and provides comprehensive visual representation of current user activity and bandwidth consumption.

GFI WebMonitor 2012 also includes a broad array of capabilities that enable SMBs to provide employee Internet access without sacrificing network protection or employee productivity:

• GFI ThreatTrack URL blocking – Blacklists hundreds of thousands of websites serving malicious content.
• Website Reputation Index – Offers a “safeness” rating for websites based on their threat profiles.
• Multiple security engines – Utilises multiple antivirus and other security engines to scan all Internet traffic for malicious content – ensuring maximum threat protection.
• Zero-hour web security – Provides near real-time updates for all security engines to protect against zero-hour threats.
• Action-based alerts – Notifies admins and other identified users via email when security risks or violations of pre-defined Internet usage policies occur, such as excessive downloads, non-productive web browsing, or when malware is detected. Users can configure alerts to their specific needs.
• Streaming media blocking – Enables administrators to block bandwidth-consuming audio and video streaming elements of a website without banning the entire site.
• Instant messaging management – Mitigates risks by blocking a number of messaging clients, including Google Chat, Facebook Chat and other instant messaging portals.
• Soft blocking – Allows administrators to define policies that selectively allow users or groups of users to temporarily override blocking policies after a warning is issued.
• Customised reporting – Creates highly targeted reports to help various teams within an organization make better decisions about employee Internet activity.
• Search engine monitoring – Monitors what terms employees are searching for in various search engines to gain better insight into their web browsing habits and the mood of the organization.