Internet Usage Quotas

Foster productivity and prevent internet abuse without strict user limitations

How much and what can your users do on the Internet is a never-ending dilemma. On the one hand, fast and unrestricted Internet access can boost productivity while, on the other hand, it also opens up possibilities for misuse and lost productivity. To both protect their users and prevent service abuse, organizations enforce a variety of controls, from blacklisting specific unwanted content, or even whitelisting only the allowed content.

These approaches do in fact limit content availability, but can also appear too strict and cause complaints or even motivate users to try to bypass the controls. Moreover, they do not address the time and volume of Internet usage; there’s a difference between spending 3 minutes and 3 hours on YouTube.

Our Internet Usage Quotas solution overcomes these challenges and enables you to set up an Internet access policy based on data usage that will satisfy your users (employees, students, guests, etc.) and prevent undesired behavior, Internet abuses, or bandwidth consumption.

Healthy compromise that fosters productivity

Our solution gives you an opportunity to set up controlled Internet access policies that won’t annoy your users (and cause complaints) while at the same time efficiently limit undesired behavior.

Easy to administer

There is no clear recipe for instantly knowing which Internet usage policy will work best in which organization. It will take some time to figure out the optimal parameters for your organizations and, therefore, our solution is easy to administer and enables the quick deployment of changes.

Affordable for enterprise environment

There are several solutions on the market for Internet usage control, but they are mainly developed for telecom operators and, therefore, they are not a good fit (i.e. are too expensive) for enterprise environments. Our solution is designed for enterprises and educational organizations and, therefore, they are much more affordable and easy to implement.

You only need a supported firewall and Active Directory

Most organizations already have these in place. For some major firewall vendors, we already have out of the box solutions in place, while for others we can develop an integration per request.

How does it work?

The Internet Usage Quotas solution allows you to establish daily volume quotas for Internet access per user. Each user is assigned a megabyte-based daily quota, enforced on the Internet firewall, and is either throttled or denied access when this quota is exceeded.

The solution allows you to set up different policies, such as:

All Internet access of a specific user is subject to a daily quota, and access is revoked after the quota is spent. The quota is replenished daily.
All Internet access of a specific user is subject to a daily quota, and further access is possible, but heavily throttled.
A subset of Internet content (that which is critically needed to conduct business) is always available without regard to quotas, and all other content is subject to a daily volume quota.

You can easily combine our volume-based solution with content-category-based enforcement (such as URL filtering on a firewall) for a more granular approach.