StaffCop Enterprise - Review 2020 - PCMag India

StaffCop Enterprise, which begins at $98 per perpetual license for a minimum of five users, is a comprehensive and powerful employee monitoring and threat detection solution designed for large enterprises. However, while it's now available under one tier, StaffCop Enterprise's unique perpetual licensing model and focus on larger organizations (for up to 25,000 employees). That might alienate it from the more budget-minded small to midsize business (SMB) crowd. Also, it's on-premises model and comprehensive feature set are better suited for large companies requiring deep and customizable employee surveillance. For such organizations, StaffCop Enterprise delivers strong insider threat detection features. These include user behavior analysis, as well as threat detection at an early stage. StaffCop's tracking features and analysis put it in the same class as our Editors' Choice selections, Veriato Cerebral and Teramind.

In terms of support, StaffCop Enterprise provides a knowledge base complete with FAQ's, installation guides, and upgrades. Technical support is available by way of email support from Monday to Friday (5 AM to 2M (GMT), this is accessible through an online ticket system or via email. StaffCop Enterprise is only available as an on-premises installation and requires an involved setup process and multi-step virtual machine (VM) provisioning process to get up and running. Once you get over this considerable hurdle, it remains as one of the more comprehensive on-premises employee monitoring solutions for business.

New Pricing for a Single Tier

Since we reviewed it last, StaffCop has reduced the number of offerings from three tiers to one tier which is StaffCop Enterprise. Starting at $98 per perpetual license for a minimum of five users (or five workstations). Compressing its offerings into one clear enterprise tier is a smart move since it avoids any confusion and also clarifies that enterprise businesses are its focus. StaffCop Enterprise also offers what it calls "floating licenses" which let organizations free up and re-allocate that license to another workstation. Standard licenses are tied to each machine's hardware ID and cannot be given to another workstation. All licenses are perpetual and come with a free 30-day trial, free upgrades, and 12 months of support from the date of activation.

Overall, while StaffCop can certainly help a small to midsize businesses (SMBs), these organizations are usually better served by a cloud-based solution. These tend to have more flexible pricing and deployment options, both of which are more important than ever during the pandemic and our new more widely distributed work model. Among the newer entrants we've tested, Controlio and Workpuls represent some of the more innovative SMB-focused solutions available. However, while StaffCop Enterprise may be a more conventional employee monitoring solution, it still plays to the needs of enterprise businesses and other large institutions and is unapologetic about its feature set and focus.

On-Premises Only Deployment

StaffCop Enterprise is an on-premises solution that does not offer a cloud-based deployment option. The admin dashboard can be accessed via a web browser, but only after you've installed the software on your server or provisioned a virtual machine (VM). The StaffCop Enterprise installation entails setting up a VM instance through Oracle VirtualBox or Microsoft Hyper-V, and then a lengthy step-by-step provisioning process plus installation of the monitoring software itself.

There are still various businesses and enterprises that require more stringent protection over their data and feel more secure if their employee management tools, and all the data they collect, are kept safe within their perimeter. For instances where businesses need to monitor employees and endpoints without internet access, or which need data sovereignty for compliance reasons, the cloud deployments are out of the question. This can also save on expenses tied in to the subscription model that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions require.

StaffCop provided detailed instructions on installing StaffCop Server on a Windows 10 machine through the free Oracle VirtualBox virtualization software and a dedicated support contact to help out with any issues. But you will still had to do a good deal of manual troubleshooting. The StaffCop Enterprise monitoring agent only runs on Linux or Windows (supporting Windows 10, 8.1, 7, and Vista), or it can run on Windows Server 2003, 2008, or 2012. The agent requires 2 GB of RAM and 5 GB of free disk space. The StaffCop Server only runs on GNU/Linux 64-bit (Ubuntu or Debian) and requires 8 GB of RAM and 10 GB of free disk space plus 256 MB per each terminal server. Installation involved downloading Oracle VirtualBox for free and then provisioning a 64-bit Ubuntu VM on a Windows 10 computer.

Even though the test machine was running Windows 10, which supports 64-bit architecture by default, VirtualBox initially only presented 32-bit VM options. This was solved by an advanced restart our my machine to update the BIOS settings in order to enable virtualization before my screen matched the StaffCop Enterprise user manual to complete the VM setup. And even then the manual did not match up exactly. I had to hope that the settings worked in order to finally get to my admin dashboard (which you can open in any browser window by entering the StaffCop Server IP address). The installation and setup took more time than actually testing the product. I had to go back through several steps in the VM setup to fix network and mirroring issues before finally completing my setup and opening the working dashboard in my browser.

StaffCop Enterprise has a feature set to rival Editors' Choice winners Teramind and Veriato Cerebral, but its manual setup was even more of a pain than the on-premises installation of Veriato and the manual compatibility configuration required to install InterGuard .

Comprehensive Employee Monitoring

Businesses that choose StaffCop Enterprise will get one of the most comprehensive employee monitoring solution with a host of endpoint tracking features. This includes application usage, website activity, email tracking, instant messaging and softphone, screen capture, live view, remote control, file and document tracking, and even web cam capture. There's very little that StaffCop can't access and capture, which makes it a formidable end-to-end employee monitoring tool that also features substantial threat analysis.

The StaffCop Enterprise admin interface is a modern, responsive dashboard with a number of menus and filters to narrow down the monitoring data you're seeing. The admin menu on the left-hand side breaks down contacts, policies, accounts, agents, configuration, server preferences, and settings as well as licensing and installation options. However, the real power of the interface is opening the Filters tab from the top navigation to break down the data coming in by event type, computer, account, app, website, network connection, intercepted file, conversation (chat, email, instant message, etc.), data and time, or a triggered filter.

As with Teramind, StaffCop Enterprise lets you set up regular instances that can trigger automated actions or notifications with some complex logic. Atop the filter pane is a search bar for keyword-specific tracking and reports. StaffCop Enterprise and Teramind are the only tools we tested that offer full optical character recognition (OCR) to search for and track keywords across every data type available: emails, chats and instant messages (IMs), keystrokes, OCR on all of the app and browser windows on an employee's screen, and even full document and file scanning to search for keywords in the body of a Microsoft Word or PDF document. InterGuard and Veriato 360 can track a document's path and pick up data such as the file name or the attached document, but they can't run full OCR on the document as StaffCop Enterprise and Teramind can.

StaffCop Enterprise also monitors cloud storage services such as Google Drive and OneDrive, and can not only scan keywords and data within the documents but it can log all file operations when a user copies, uploads, downloads, or transfers files. This is also true of any USB drives or removable storage devices connected to an employee's workstation to which they are adding or removing files. Clicking on the filters panel, I was able to go into the Intercepted File tab and drill down into different options such as device, printing, or disk drive to view file and system information as well as a shadow copy of the file.

StaffCop Enterprise lets you set up keywords, notifications, and pre-defined triggers when specific fields are accessed. It lets you manage all of this in the Policies tab where you can set up productivity, employee efficiency, time tracking, and other types of policies. There's also a powerful keylogger, which monitors activity and sends out alerts in real time. On our test workstation, we set up an alert when employee type to search through keystrokes to show log-ins, passwords, and the full text of whatever an employee typed. This also works with data types such as credit cards. So, when someone enters a credit card number or a corporate card, StaffCop can send an alert to an administrator notifying them that a company card has been used. This level of oversight and detection is hyper-focused in its reach into granular user activity and only Teramind and Veriato Cerebral matched this level of depth.

Screenshots can be set up by specified time intervals or you can create rules to take a screenshot (for instance, every time a user switches to another app or another tab in their browser). The idea is to provide visual evidence and context to see what the user sees when tracking work, conducting a data leak or incident response investigation, or measuring productivity. There is no integration between keystrokes and video capture or screenshots, which is functionality that Controlio offers to produce a more cohesive monitoring result.

Live administration lets the admin take full remote desktop control of an employee's workstation. InterGuard lets you remotely wipe data from a monitored device but only StaffCop Enterprise and Teramind offer the full workflow of being able to set up automated triggers and alerts to monitor whether an employee is breaking the rules or compromising network security, and then immediately take over their workstation. For businesses guarding company secrets or valuable intellectual property (IP), the ability to quickly go from threat alert to proactive endpoint shutdown is critical.

StaffCop Enterprise also lets you do a lot with all of this data in the form of reports. Depending on the level of visibility and access configured, an admin, manager, or the users themselves can monitor employee statistics online via the admin panel or receive daily reports about previous-day activities of specific employees or whole departments by specifying report delivery time. Reports are generated in PDF file format.

Available from the top navigation bar in any tab, you can run a report on any combination of monitoring vectors or choose from pre-built reports. StaffCop Enterprise offers solid productivity tracking along the lines of what you'll find in ActivTrak, DeskTime, and Work Examiner, letting admins configure what apps and websites are productive and unproductive based on specific user groups or categories. This can be useful depending on an employee's job function; for instance, categorizing Instagram as unproductive for a sales manager but as a productive app for a social media marketing specialist.

In the Summary Report, for instance, admins or managers can see a list of top latecomers, top active and inactive users (based on keystroke and mouse data), top productive and unproductive app usage, and a detailed report showing category breakdowns such as time spent on social networks versus time spent in email clients. StaffCop Enterprise also offers some more advanced reporting and data visualization options such as heat maps, a threat analyzer dashboard, and an anomalies graph that maps any abnormal behavior triggered by automated alerts and filters. While the graph is not quite as robust as the Risk dashboard you get with Teramind, it has the best anomaly detection and incident-focused reporting among the employee monitoring platforms we tested.

StaffCop Enterprise also stands with Teramind as the only tools that will pick up microphone, webcam, and audio recordings from a user's workstation. This draconian feature can be useful when monitoring large numbers of employees in call centers or customer service scenarios. However, one feature that only StaffCop Enterprise possesses is the ability to create custom lexicons of keywords and phrases based on unique user vocabularies.

Complete On-Premises Monitoring

Businesses can maximize their use of StaffCop Enterprise by fine tuning its various recording features to their specific needs. The granular level of user rights and access privileges covers most enterprise scenarios while ensuring managers can only access the data that is relevant to their teams. The ability to customize monitoring policies to adhere to compliance requirements and the option of having the endpoints in stealth mode or configured to be visible is a welcome feature for transparency's sake. StaffCop Enterprise also excels in keeping data safe, with full HTTPS encryption and decryption only taking place on the on-premises server behind a secure firewall.

Most of the industry has moved towards cloud-based deployment options, even StaffCop rival Work Examiner, provides a cloud option through Controlio, which is both a SaaS-based cloud solution and one aimed particularly at SMBs and businesses managing remote users. StaffCop Enterprise maintains its on-premises focus as well as its perpetual pricing model per user or per seat. What was once the standard-bearer of employee monitoring now seems like an outlier, specially now in the time of remote work. While some of its competitors have pivoted for the new reality by adding productivity tracking, collaboration, and even attendance and geolocation features, StaffCop Enterprise has maintained its already prodigious feature set and sharpened its focus for on-premises and enterprise deployments. While it is a solid choice for this scenario, it still falls behind Editors' Choice selection, Teramind.