The South Montgomery Community School Corporation's mission is to provide an educational program and learning environment which will empower students to become life-long learners with the knowledge, skills and attitudes to be successful, responsible, productive members of society.
The Challenge
As an educational institution serving kindergarten through 12th grade, the ability to filter web content and block inappropriate websites at The South Montgomery School Corporation is important. The institution was using Novell's BorderManager with SurfControl for their content filtering but was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the product. "The system could not keep up with our demands and users, including students, could easily bypass the web proxy so they could visit any site they wanted", said Blake Zachary, Director of Technology, at South Montgomery School Corporation.
The product also had many limitations forcing Zachary to work around bugs. Additionally, it was clear to Zachary that Novell had no plans for improving the product in the near future.
The Requirements
Zachary began his search by looking for content filtering tools that offer a 100% web based management portal and allowed him to create different users. He also wanted a dedicated appliance for web filtering and caching.
The Solution
After looking at several possible products including Lightspeed traffic control, CIPA filter and the Barracuda web filter, Zachary conducted an onsite demonstration of the Astaro Web Gateway. Zachary was impressed with the unit and he chose to implement the Astaro Web Gateway 4000 because of Astaro's simple to use WebAdmin management portal and because of Astaro's good reputation in the market.
Success with Astaro
A year after implementing the Astaro Web Gateway Zachary has noticed a stark improvement in web filtering. "There is no longer a way for users to access the Internet without traveling through the web proxy since it runs in bridge mode between the firewall and the network," explained Zachary.
Using the content filtering capabilities provided by the Astaro Web Gateway Zachary was able to free up a substantial amount of bandwidth that was previously being used for prohibited web surfing which also had a positive impact on the corporation's budget. The granular reports provided by the Astaro Web Gateway make it possible for Zachary to identify problem users and workstations and to easily address individual attempts to violate the web filtering policy.
Zachary continued, "We've saved countless hours of administration time by using the Astaro Web Gateway's reports and web interface. In the entire time we've had the product in place we've had no issues."
