LAN Activity Monitoring and How That Will Help Your Business
When you operate a business, you need to make sure all the t’s are crossed, and i’s are dotted. One aspect of running a business that often is neglected, especially for SMBs or newly minted enterprise businesses, is network monitoring.
Every business should adopt some form of employee monitoring in order to ensure that their employees are working dutifully when they should be and when they say they are. Employee monitoring can also be a useful tool for monitoring, preventing, and mitigating insider threats.
However, additional network monitoring should also be adopted in order to streamline business processes, cut costs, and provide security teams with a more in-depth look at activity across the network.
Businesses of all sizes should consider LAN activity monitoring. Here’s what LAN activity monitoring is, its features, and why you should consider it to improve business operations.
What is LAN Activity Monitoring?
LAN activity monitoring is software that monitors all the activity that occurs on the local area network (LAN). Most physical businesses will operate on a LAN because it connects computers together in a type of a secure network.
Users connected to the LAN would then be able to access other computers, but usually only the same area of that computer that the LAN has access to. In many cases, people interact with LANs in personal networks, family networks, school networks, or in an office building.
A LAN activity monitoring solution will usually be software that monitors activity on all the computers connected to the LAN. The monitoring solution will usually be accessed from a centralized administrator computer (otherwise known as the server). All the settings will be adjusted through this main admin console and the settings are adjusted for all of the computers.
LAN activity monitoring will also record all activity into a special log file for further investigation and analysis. Consider LAN activity monitoring to be an extension of employee monitoring software.
Features of LAN Activity Monitoring
Considering that LAN activity monitoring has a similar capability compared to employee monitoring, it is no surprise that there are many overlapping features. The essential difference between the two products is that LAN activity monitoring can read the activity and events that are occurring in your network, whereas basic employee monitoring cannot.
LAN activity monitoring has the following features:
- Monitoring and recording web browsing history
- Recording time spent on websites
- Recording and reporting applications
- Reporting user productivity
- Recording and storing keystrokes
- Screenshot and webcam monitoring
- Email and chat recording
- Attendance tracker; login and logoff times
- Record files copied to USB
This provides an added level of protection to your business, as a way of protecting your company from malicious insider threats as well as alerting your security team to potential data breaches or data leakages.
Reasons to Consider LAN Activity Monitoring
Because LANs provide lateral computer access to any user on the network, there is some potential that a malicious actor, whether they are an external threat or a malicious insider, could gain access to one computer and therefore be able to laterally move to another computer on that network. For this reason, LAN activity monitoring is essential. By implementing this technology, you could stop your business from falling victim to a malicious attack.
In addition to this increased security, a network monitor is a more robust solution than employee monitoring. This is because the monitor is watching the movement that occurs throughout the LAN network as opposed to what is happening from the viewpoint of the computer.
By adopting a comprehensive network monitor, your company can also assess more general networking needs, such as networking performance, usage trends, and productivity. You can see the specific applications that are more popular, as well as the type of movements that users are typically engaged in.
If there is a feature in your system that is not being used, you can cut it out and save costs. On the flip side, if there is an activity that your company over-uses, you can find a way to optimize that task for more efficient work and more efficient use of the company’s network.
Another way that LAN activity monitoring can be used is for network troubleshooting. This monitoring solution will give your company clear benchmarks for data going through the network, and it will also alert to abnormalities in workplace performance, therefore providing insight into new areas of workflow or barriers to productivity.
How LAN Activity Monitoring Can Help Your Business
If you have employee monitoring or a networking firewall, adopting LAN activity monitoring might sound redundant, but this is not the case. In fact, it is providing your company with additional insight into your business’ activities and allows your security team a deeper understanding of how the network functions.
It is also a more powerful monitoring solution to protect against threats, whether they are incidental threats or due to a malicious insider.
By SoftActivity Team