NetSpective^® Overview

TeleMate.Net's NetSpective appliance gives enterprises fast, scalable, high performance protection against the high cost of wasteful and risky Internet usage, including legal liability, adverse publicity, lost employee productivity and wasted bandwidth.

Our NetSpective appliance is a hardware solution that uses "pass-by" URL filtering to deliver high-performance Internet access policy management without introducing a point of failure. TeleMate.Net's unique Adaptive Filtering™ technology offers accurate categorization of all surfed Web content, NetSpective includes NetAuditor, an Internet access reporting system, to provide a complete Internet access management solution for mid- to large-sized networks.

NetSpective delivers

Ease of use. Designed as a stand-alone network appliance, NetSpective is a complete solution that's easy to install and maintain. It automatically updates its library of categorized sites, providing more timely and accurate filtering and reporting without requiring IT time and attention. Additionally, NetSpective includes the NetAuditor reporting engine that makes it easy to spot abuse and document activity as needed.

Fast performance. Because NetSpective is a hardware solution, it provides effective Internet access control without degrading network performance. It provides better scalability and performance than firewall plug-in solutions.

Reliable operation. NetSpective operates independently of other network components, so it cannot degrade overall network performance or the function of particular components, such as firewalls. And unlike many firewall plug-ins and proxy-based filtering products, NetSpective utilizes TeleMate.Net's patented SideScan filtering technology, eliminating the risk of a single point of failure on your network.

Accurate categorization. Adaptive Filtering provides superior control over high-risk and objectionable Web content. It provides fast, accurate URL categorization of actual corporate Web traffic, not just a list of possible sites.

More about "SideScan" filtering technology

NetSpective installs as a separate hardware device on the network independent of other network components, such as firewalls. It is a stand-alone appliance optimized for URL filtering.

Many URL filtering solutions use a "proxy" or "pass-through" method of filtering that requires all traffic to pass through the filter device and be inspected before being allowed to continue. This can become a network performance bottleneck, especially for proxy filtering solutions that operate as add-ons or plug-ins to firewalls or caching servers. It can even become a potential point of network failure, should the proxy device fail and cause all traffic to be blocked.

In contrast, NetSpective's SideScan™ filtering monitors and filters traffic completely transparent to network traffic flows. This ensures fast network performance and doesn't introduce the possibility of network failure should the appliance malfunction. And by implementing pass-by filtering in a stand-alone, high-performance Internet appliance, NetSpective offers a scalable solution for the performance and reliability benefits of SideScan filtering even in a large network.

In operation, NetSpective inspects URL requests as they traverse the network. Each URL request is checked against the appliance's local copy of NetSpective's Adaptive Filtering library. If the URL request matches a site that is blocked, NetSpective cancels the request. If the URL is listed as a categorized site, the request is logged for use by NetAuditor.

If the URL is not found in the library, NetSpective records the request as uncategorized. On a daily basis, NetSpective relays all uncategorized requests to NetSpective's Adaptive Filtering Lab (NAFL) via the Internet. The NAFL aggregates URL categorization queries from all users, removes duplicates, and categorizes the new URLs. Newly categorized URLs are redistributed daily to all NetSpective appliances in the field.

More about Adaptive Filtering technology

NetSpective's Adaptive Filtering technology uses automated content recognition to efficiently and accurately identify the actual Web surfing activity of TeleMate.Net's entire NetSpective subscriber community. It doesn't waste resources tracking content that is never accessed and it ensures quick, positive categorization for Web content that is actually surfed, including obscure sites that wouldn't normally be identified in a scan of the web.

When NetSpective logs an uncategorized site, the URL is sent to the NetSpective Adaptive Filtering Lab and is reviewed using automated content analysis tools and other methods. Within 72 hours, newly submitted sites are classified in some 53 categories, including categories for objectionable material (pornography and other forms of racially and sexually offensive material that pose a liability hazard in the workplace), productivity-related material (sites that represent unproductive uses of employee time during the workday), and general categories used by NetAuditor for reports.

In contrast, other list-based products try to categorize as much of the Web as they can by covering the sites they think will be accessed. In the best case they will track mainstream Web sites but will often miss the more obscure porn, illegal and racist sites. In the worst case they will fail to categorize a substantial proportion of Web content.

Some products improve their accuracy by submitting new sites for categorization by human reviewers. But this can be a slow process. Automated content recognition allows NetSpective to stay more current with new objectionable sites than solutions that depend on human review.

Other products that categorize primarily based on analysis of keywords found on the site offer some level of categorization for every site surfed. They can categorize every site visited. But keyword categorization often misses objectionable content or overblocks, especially if the site contains only pictures and not text, as is often the case with porn sites. NetSpective addresses this problem with far greater accuracy than keyword-based URL filtering solutions because it conducts comprehensive content recognition analysis on the content contained in pages linked to the pages that contain only images.

NetAuditor

NetSpective includes a standard reporting package, NetAuditor, which provides specialized functionality optimized for the NetSpective appliance. NetAuditor provides 23 standard reports for the analysis of NetSpective log file data (the NetSpective appliance logs date and time, NetSpective system name, client IP address, protocol, action (blocked or not blocked), category, and URL). The NetAuditor system, installed on a separate PC, offers a targeted solution for Internet access reporting and provides essential documentation for Internet access policy enforcement. It makes it easy to produce reports on Internet access grouped by content categories, offers detail-on-demand reporting to help spot abuse and document Internet activity for problem resolution.