Not surprisingly, company employees spend a significant proportion of their time at work surfing the web. This is often at great expense to enterprises; for example if a business has 100 employees who all spend an hour a day surfing non-work-related sites the total cost to the business is close to €400,000 a year.

However, this is not the complete picture as the degradation of network performance should also be reflected in the cost. In fact, businesses carry an overhead of as much as 60% of non-work related traffic on their networks. There is also significant risk to a company’s reputation, as users may download inappropriate content.

Of even greater concern is the threat caused by malicious applications, often introduced inadvertently while surfing leisure sites. These can collect personal information, take control of a user’s computer and redirect web browser activity. To counter these threats and increase productivity, enterprises need to be able to manage network traffic and block access to inappropriate content.

NETASQ’s URL filter enables organizations to block specific websites, without interfering with employee access to appropriate sites and their day to day work. Every NETASQ firewall includes an integrated URL filter which identifies and classifies millions of websites. NETASQ regularly scans a range of data sources to update the URL database using a processing algorithm, present in NETASQ’s.

Every enterprise needs to use the Internet, both for email and to browse the web. At the same time, surfing leads to reductions in employee productivity, potential legal problems and crucially, significant threats to the security of your network.

All of these imply real or potential costs to your organization, which is why you need an effective web content-filtering solution.

NETASQ works closely with Optenet, who have been global leaders since 1997 in web-content filtering technology.

Over 10 milllion web users are currently protected by Optenet solutions.



Corporate clients include multinationals such as McDonalds and PSA Peugeot Citroen, operators such as Orange, Wanadoo and Numericable, as well as major educational institutions. All NETASQ models, from the U120 upwards offer an Optenet option. The extensive database of over 100 million URLs is classified into 60 categories, including pornography, press, games, betting, webmail, P2P and spyware.

A parallel processing algorithm guarantees optimal performance levels, with latency below 1 ms.

Daily automatic updating ensures that both analysis engine parameters and URL lists are instantly and incrementally refined.