GFI Software Launches GFI WebMonitor™ 2012

Intuitive user interface, smart dashboards and action-based alerts among new features that make it even easier for SMBs to strengthen network security

GFI Software continues to solidify GFI WebMonitor™ as one of the industry’s leading web security solutions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Last fall, the company introduced several innovations to enable SMBs to better defend their networks, including a website safeness rating, stronger blocking of malicious URLs and more robust protection against zero-hour threats. Today, GFI Software announced GFI WebMonitor 2012, with additional enhancements that make it even easier for SMBs to protect networks from malicious threats.

The latest edition of GFI WebMonitor boasts an array of new features—including a new user interface, “smart” dashboards, 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.

“While IT administrators may be concerned about employees visiting websites that create security issues or hog bandwidth, other parts of the business are more interested in how web access impacts productivity or   potential legal liabilities that may arise from employees visiting and passing on inappropriate content in the workplace,” said David Attard, product manager, GFI Software. “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.”

Smart Dashboards Provide Targeted Insight
Using GFI WebMonitor’s smart dashboards, SMBs get a complete view of all web browsing activity happening within their organization 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’s smart dashboards equip SMBs with powerful, yet easy-to-understand insight into who is doing what and how that activity affects the organization,” commented Attard. “Using this information, companies can quickly identify and remediate problem areas and mitigate risk within the organization.”

Additional Features and Functionality
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 – Utilizes 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.
• Customized Reporting  – Creates highly targeted reports to help various teams within an organization make better decisions about employee Internet activity.
• Search Engine Monitoring – Monitor what terms employees are searching for in various search engines to gain better insight into their web browsing habits and mood of the organization.

To learn about GFI WebMonitor, call 888-243-4329, email sales@gfi.com or visit www.gfi.com for a free trial.

About GFI
GFI Software provides web and mail security, archiving and fax, networking and security software and hosted IT solutions for small to medium-sized businesses (SMB) via an extensive global partner community. GFI products are available either as on-premise solutions, in the cloud or as a hybrid of both delivery models. With award-winning technology, a competitive pricing strategy, and a strong focus on the unique requirements of SMBs, GFI satisfies the IT needs of organizations on a global scale. The company has offices in the United States, UK, Austria, Australia, Malta, Hong Kong, Philippines and Romania, which together support hundreds of thousands of installations worldwide. GFI is a channel-focused company with thousands of partners throughout the world and is also a Microsoft Gold ISV Partner.