It’s Cyber Monday and 13 million people are shopping online at work. Is your AUP in place?

Today is Cyber Monday and an estimated 13 million people are planning to shop from work today—some as many as two hours or more from their office computer.  Sites like CyberMonday.com will spotlight special deals every hour of the day, and throughout the holidays as retailers offer attractive offers between now and early January.

Many companies permit their workers to shop online during the holidays within reasonable limits. Yet some have absolutely no strategy for educating their employees about what’s unreasonable, or how they can avoid potential risks associated with phishing tactics, scams, viruses and malware.

When it comes to online shopping at work, where’s the fine line between acceptable Internet use and outright abuse?

That’s up to each business to decide and enforce.  To accomplish this, companies should start with a solid, well-communicated PC and Internet Acceptable Use Policy.  SpectorSoft offers a free whitepaper along with a sample AUP to help businesses get started:  http://www.spector360.com/whitepapers/index.htm.

Once a company’s policy is in place and communicated with employees, the next and more important step is to enforce the AUP using an award-winning corporate monitoring solution like Spector 360: http://www.spector360.com.

Spector 360 records everything an employee does at the PC and on the Internet, including web sites visited, emails sent and received, chats and instant messages, keystrokes typed, files transferred, documents printed, and applications run. Through a first-of-its-kind surveillance camera-like recording tool, Spector 360 can also show in exact visual detail what an employee does every step of the way.

If employees are shopping during work hours, Spector 360 will detect and record it. It can even allow companies to block online shopping during peak hours if they feel that productivity and security may be compromised. Spector 360 can also identify who is printing confidential documents or saving them to removable devices, who is taking excessively long lunch breaks, and even who might have inadvertently clicked on a virus when shopping online from their desk.

But don’t just take our word for it.  Numerous Spector 360 Success Stories illustrate in detail just how effective our products are at minimizing liability and risk, while saving tens of thousands of dollars in productivity losses. If you suspect employees are shopping excessively from their desks this holiday season, perhaps it’s time to set acceptable guidelines and monitor them with a product like Spector 360.

Like more than 50,000 other businesses that use our products, you’ll be glad you did.