Locking down browsers in healthcare settings to prevent staff misuse

More and more healthcare applications are being re-platformed to run as web applications. While it’s good for ease of deployment, this means that staff that had no business using web browsers before now have valid work reasons to run browsers. This may lead to “unofficial” use of office browsers for non-healthcare use such as shopping, reading the news, playing on FaceBook, or other types of misuse.

While some misuse may be acceptable because all it does is waste time, other types of misuse like downloading files, playing music online, etc will cause viruses to enter the network or may take up valuable network bandwidth.

I recommend locking down your browsers so that staff can only use it appropriately. Check out these tips and directions to help prevent most common misuse of Internet Explorer. While these are not foolproof, they will take care of basic restrictions.