Improve Employee Productivity with Universal Threat Management

The concept behind company time is simple enough: you are employed, and therefore expected to do whatever you agreed upon while "on the clock." To be fair, you are given a few breaks to attend to personal matters; yet, as easy to grasp as this seems, the average employee wastes two hours of company time per day on the internet.

Too often, one of the more challenging jobs of managing an office is to keep employees on task while on company time. If the internet usage problem was taken care of, this alone would increase staff productivity by over 25 percent! One solution is to try and adjust the internet filters on every PC; but if the internet settings exist on the PC, it will not take a computer genius to undue your blocks, or simply access the web from a personal device.

A Universal Threat Management (UTM) is a security solution that can filter out problem internet websites over your entire network. The UTM is most commonly used as a strong defense against computer viruses and all the other known cyber threats, but UTM can also filter out websites that you deem to be counterproductive to the company's interest, thus increasing office productivity. Although filtering out a bad attitude is still a challenge to employee efficiency, and unfortunately there is not a Universal Taming of the Mood solution for attitude adjustments--yet.

With UTM, you can filter out every time-wasting website that really grinds your gears. If your employees are finding YouTube to be more interesting than their job, then you can use UTM to block YouTube and bring a renewed focus to their tasks at hand. The same UTM filtering capabilities also applies to all the social media sites, personal email, Pandora, whatever memes are, and anything else on the internet not related to boosting your bottom line. Along with blocking the websites of your choosing, the UTM will also automatically filter out security threats and all those websites with the pictures of the people who have seem to have forgotten their clothes off camera.

Of course, some people are better at handling the awesome power of the internet better than others. For these responsible workers, UTM will allow you to adjust the settings so that the people you trust will be able to access anything they need from the web, while everybody else is blocked from watching cat videos. You can even use the UTM to keep yourself on task and accountable with your own internet usage. Marketing group VerticalResponse did a survey of CEOs/business owners in which ⅓ wished they were able to spend less time on social media, with 43% of small businesses spending 6 or more hours per week on social media. UTM can help keep everybody in the office focused off the internet, and focused on their assigned tasks, making business more productive all around.

If you are looking to gain even more productivity out of your staff, UTM is a secure tool that will provide employees anytime access to your company's network. Anytime access has been shown to add at least one extra hour of productivity per week per staff member, multiply this extra hour by the amount of employees you have, and you can see how the value of the UTM can quickly add up. The capability of the UTM to allow users to remote into your network from home, or from anywhere else, is also great for morale, and you may need this boost after taking away everybody's favorite internet sites from the workplace.

There are many different models of UTM designed around the number of users on your network. Whether you have a staff of 5 or 2,500, Preferred can find a model that works for your company. However many employees you have, if you take that number and multiply it by at least 11 extra hours a week, you will see how the UTM will very quickly provide a return on your investment. If you have any questions about UTM, then call us at 708-781-7110 and we will be happy to discuss with you additional ways UTM can benefit your business.