Employees surfing on the Internet in an uncontrolled way without limits not only are less productive, but they also expose their company to incalculable legal risks. If files with extremist or pornographic contents or contents which is protected by copy right are downloaded or even circulated, the company will be made liable. As is revealed in the October 2005 edition of the Linux Professionell magazine, the additional traffic also unnecessarily impairs the computer network´s capacity.
In order to prevent such dangers, besides firewalls, spam and virus protection also the application of content filters is indispensable. The delicate task of these tools is to block undesirable information, but at the same time they have to ensure that the productivity of the employees does not suffer from the blocking and that the pieces of information which are urgently required do not get blocked. These contents guards examine the klicked web pages, check their contents and subsequently carry out pre-defined actions such as the blocking of a certain web page.
But with these tools running, a company’s server also works markedly more slowly. In order to mitigate these unwanted effects, it is generally recommended to install the content filter behind the proxy server. The proxy filter will carry out the preliminary filtering, whereas the actual content-filter will do the fine work according to the settings. Given that in this case the incoming data flow has already been pre-selected, the increased load can be handled without major problems, as was stated by the magazine. 