JSB’s SurfControl division this week fleshed out details of its new Web4Business initiative, a strategy designed to enable companies to implement a company-wide internet access and filtering policy. Under the new initiative, the Cheshire, UK- based net filtering company will use Dunn & Bradstreet’s database of over 500,000 SIC code-listed US companies to enable businesses to better define which web sites their employees can and can not access.
The new plan enables companies to select a group, or groups of SIC-coded companies that best correspond to their business interests. For example, a publishing house would select the SIC industry code that related to the publishing industry, thereby enabling its employees to just access the web sites of companies who fall within that code. The aim, said JSB’s SurfControl division’s president Steve Purdham, is to enable companies to enforce a company net policy that tells employees where they can go, not where they can’t go. He said that a big brother negative filtering strategy is out of date and doesn’t work. Also, in the past, companies that did employ positive filtering had to go through a list of sites manually and decide which were and were not relevant, Purdham said.
Now, under the Web4Business initiative, that process can be cut down to simply selecting the relevant SIC-code industry group, of which there are around 18,000 to choose from. There’s also a verification button within JSB’s software that lets companies check if they are included within the correct SIC industry code. If the listing is incorrect, the software enables an administrator to contact D&B directly to make the correction. The technology has been incorporated into the latest release of JSB’s filtering software, SuperScout 2.5, which serves to monitor the business sites the users are accessing and also to implement the company’s SIC-code policy. As a user goes to a particular web site, the software will check to see if that particular web address is included within the organization’s predefined SIC-code listings, and either deny or allow access to the site.
Available as of April, SuperScout 2.5 is a server based product and costs $1,195 for 50 users. A monitoring-only version of the software, SurfControl Scout, costs $99 for a 50-user license.
