Business monitoring software
Analyze and act on IoT and other streaming data with real-time systems deployed at a fraction of the cost and risk of other alternatives.
Monitor Business Performance Visualize the health of your business processes in real time Tracking business processes is the key to monitoring overall business performance. One Uniform System Businesses often have a diverse set of systems, each producing their own output. Assess Process Performance With real-time tracking systems, process performance can be assessed to determine if SLAs are being met, giving businesses the opportunity to take proactive action to correct exception situations before they escalate.
Real-time Insights Your business no longer has to rely on historical-based reporting for the status of business processes. Increased Predictive Capability When combined with a sophisticated BI tool, a repository of current process state along with a running log of activity events can be used to predict and determine opportunities for business process improvement. Capabilities Event Manager Monitor process execution by capturing process events and monitoring progress against your plan. Real-time Dashboards Visualize and access business processes in real time with summary dashboards that show the health at a glance.
Reporting Processed data is accessible to near real-time analytics tools. Read more about them below, along with our advice about the features to look for as you choose employee monitoring software for your business, how much you can expect to pay and tips to help you get a good deal. Below are all of our reviews for employee monitoring software and related categories. Our coverage also includes reviews of the best internet management software and small business content filters.
See all of our reviews below. Most employee monitoring software companies charge an annual license for each user. Some offer perpetual licenses, which include updates for the year usually including one major upgrade with the option to purchase annual maintenance plans thereafter for subsequent upgrades. Only a few of the companies we reviewed offer their software as a cloud-based service SaaS , and charge a monthly fee. Some companies give you the option of purchasing annual licenses if you host the software yourself.
Most employee monitoring software companies are transparent with their pricing, posting rates on their websites. However, if you have a large number of users, many companies encourage you to speak with a sales representative for custom pricing.
The Best Employee Monitoring Software of 2018
Look for the following discounts as you compare costs:. Below are our recommendations for the best employee monitoring software. For many small businesses, employees are their most expensive investment. As such, it's disheartening to read statistics about the hours of work lost to watching cat videos , or worse, stories of employees stealing products or data. Employee monitoring software can help you safeguard confidential data and encourage productivity. It can also help you achieve regulatory compliance if your business is in an industry such as healthcare or finance that handles sensitive customer or patient information.
As you evaluate employee monitoring software, look for the following features:. Employee monitoring software is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Advanced tracking solutions may utilize mobile apps, sensors, and wearables equipped with such features as GPS tracking, microphones, and accelerometers. Companies that use this type of technology include freight companies that track drivers' routes, breaks, and driving speeds; warehouses that track worker efficiencies in pulling orders; and hospitals that want to track how often nurses wash their hands.
Since these solutions are installed and used on a single computer, they do not pose the same threat as email-surveillance programs that work around firewalls. These solutions come with additional options designed to prevent cyberbullying along with tools to monitor children and spouses when they're online. Many businesses are also on the lookout for email monitoring software, applications that monitor inbound and outbound messages for threats such as viruses, spyware and Trojans.
These programs encrypt email messages that can only be translated and read by an authorized recipient. This helps ensure sensitive information is only accessed and used by individuals who need this information while keeping it as secure as possible. If you decide to monitor employee activity and email, all of the solutions on our top 10 list include monitoring features for website activity; removable storage, such as flash drives; keyword alerts; and keystroke capturing.
Managing the threats against your office network is tricky enough without your needing to worry about employees leaking vital business information viewing inappropriate content in the workplace. Frequently the approach to this is locking down the network or blocking particular sites. The result of this is often an environment of fear and distrust as employees continue accessing unsanctioned online content from their smartphones or through anonymous proxies on the very workstations where you thought such content was inaccessible. Vulnerabilities do exist in your network and they are a very real threat to your business.
As a response to this, many businesses have been moving towards mitigating the threat of employee internet access by creating Acceptable Use Policies AUP. While these policies to vary from industry to industry, they are frequently managed by an enterprise web filtering software. The best small business content filtering software is the one that helps you manage your AUP without your having to invest too much time in it. From your business internet filter, you will likely need one that tracks user profiles with time limits and real-time threat detection to block those sites whose content has not yet been classified.
You may want to consider supporting employee devices as well to monitor their mobile traffic or to leave access altogether so you can maintain CIPA or PCI Compliance. We took the time to look at the options for you by comparing the popular business web filter brands. We reviewed them with an eye for a small business that has or less employees, and tested them for their reporting abilities where we were able. We counted off their features and ranked them against the following factors:.
Features Some things to consider when you are searching content filters are the different types of features they offer. For example, do you want to be able to control your employees' internet time? Do you allow them to surf the internet during breaks and lunches, or not at all? There are different software applications that will allow you to select times when the internet or sites are blocked and times when not to block.
Are there some websites that your employees need to have access to in order to help your business grow? Blocking Some applications allow you to create a list of safe domains that may be accessed. Do you have certain groups of employees that need access to different web domains than others? There are applications available that will allow you to create user groups and select different websites to block at different times. Using business internet software can help you to increase your productivity. Reporting Another important feature of content filters is how you are notified of different occurrences.
If you travel a lot and manage your network and employees remotely, then you also want to have access to your internet filter data remotely. Auto archiving is an important feature to look for as well with office web monitoring software.
What’s next?
You never know when you may need to review an employee's internet history. Something else to consider is choosing internet filter software that will record screenshots and keep a record of what is being searched for on the internet. These can come in handy if you ever find yourself in litigation with a disgruntled employee. The first step in our evaluation of PC-monitoring software was to work with our own IT department to ensure each application we tested is a legitimate solution and not a virus in disguise. We looked at employee-monitoring programs that are designed for microbusinesses enterprises with five or fewer employees.
Some companies have tiered packages with more user licenses and advanced features for a higher cost. This information is useful to keep in mind as you consider your current business size, company goals and potential growth. We considered the monitoring tools included with each program and gave higher marks for those applications that included functions beyond basic email, website and application surveillance.
These included options like print monitoring, social media tracking and notifications for deleted and retrieved data.
We were also impressed with solutions that include an inactivity monitor, which tells you when an employee who is on a business-designated screen is working or is leaving an approved site up while chatting, playing on their personal device or who is often away from their workstation. Attendance tracking, a feature that determines whether an employee is actually on work premises or not, is another valuable tool we looked for.
Our top two PC-monitoring solutions both have these functions. While each of the programs we reviewed has alerts to let you know when an unapproved site is being accessed or certain keywords are being typed in or searched for, we looked for additional controls for administrators. Most of the software applications on our top 10 list allow you to block or filter specific websites and monitor or block the use of removable storage devices, such as USB drives. Another tool that adds flexibility to your employee monitoring is time controls.
This allows you to set aside certain times a day when employees can browse certain types of sites, such as social media or entertainment sites. It also provides you with a way to allow certain employees access to important websites while prohibiting these sites for other workers. While monitoring employees' emails seems like an infringement of privacy, the United States Supreme Court ruled in that it is legal for companies to monitor the actions of employees while employees are on the clock or using company equipment, including laptops, pagers, USB drives and mobile devices.
However, there have never been any regulations on the type of programs companies can use to monitor employees. This means that programs that monitor key logs and capture passwords can be used; however, there is some ethical controversy surrounding whether or not they should be utilized. While the federal government doesn't place restrictions on employee internet monitoring, some individual states have put protections in place.
An increasing number of states are requiring employers to notify their workers if their company monitors online activity, including emails and keystrokes. These notifications can be disclosed within the employee handbook, as part of the new worker orientation or simply sent out as an email reminder to employees. When using employee monitoring software, you can choose to run it in either stealth or transparent mode. Stealth mode, also known as silent mode, means that your employees cannot see that they are being monitored. Good monitoring software runs unseen and undetected by employees.
Transparent monitoring is when your employees can see the surveillance program on their computer. The main benefits of BAM are to enable an enterprise to make better informed business decisions , quickly address problem areas, and re-position organizations to take full advantage of emerging opportunities. One of the most visible features of BAM solutions is the presentation of information on dashboards containing the key performance indicators KPIs used to provide assurance and visibility of activity and performance.
This information is used by technical and business operations to provide visibility, measurement, and assurance of key business activities. It is also exploited by event correlation to detect and warn of impending problems. Although BAM systems usually use a computer dashboard display to present data, BAM is distinct from the dashboards used by business intelligence BI insofar as events are processed in real-time or near real-time and pushed to the dashboard in BAM systems, whereas BI dashboards refresh at predetermined intervals by polling or querying databases.
Depending on the refresh interval selected, BAM and BI dashboards can be similar or vary considerably.
Some BAM solutions additionally provide trouble notification functions, which allows them to interact automatically with the issue tracking system. For example, whole groups of people can be sent e-mails, voice or text messages, according to the nature of the problem.
Monitoring Your Workforce. Oversight is important to every business. Whether your employees are all on the same network or distributed across. As a critical element of Business Process Management (BPM), business activity monitoring helps you understand how well your organization is running in real time. For organizations seeking a superior business activity monitoring tool, Software AG provides comprehensive business.
Automated problem solving , where feasible, can correct and restart failed processes. In nearly all BAM deployments extensive tailoring to specific enterprises is required. Many BAM solutions seek to reduce extensive customization and may offer templates that are written to solve common problems in specific sectors, for example banking, manufacturing, and stockbroking. Due to the high degree of system integration required for initial deployment, many enterprises use experts that specialize in BAM to implement solutions.
BAM is now considered [ who? Multiple sources of data can be combined from different organizational silos to provide a common operating picture that uses current information.
Wherever real-time insight has the greatest value, OI solutions can be applied to deliver the needed information. All BAM solutions process events. While most of the first BAM solutions were closely linked to BPM solutions and therefore processed events emitted as the process was being orchestrated, this had the disadvantage of requiring enterprises to invest in BPM before being able to acquire and use BAM.