Monitoring Web-Use has Never been Easier for Grace Removals with Bloxx Web Filtering

“Comparing now to before we had Bloxx Web filtering is like chalk and cheese. The Bloxx Web filter has been a great introduction to the company. It’s far easier to administer what activities a user can perform on the web, produce reports on web activity, even allow department managers to produce their own reports.”

Howard Malyon, IT Manager, Grace Removals

Company Background

Based across Australia and New Zealand, Grace Removals has been providing quality removals service solutions to individuals and corporations on a local, domestic and international basis for close to a century.

With a history extending back to 1884, Grace Removals aims to exceed its customer’s expectations by providing excellence in quality certified removal and related services to a world class standard, at value for money prices.

The Challenge

Grace Removals previously used a Microsoft proxy server to filter Internet access for its staff. This basic solution was causing major server performance issues and didn’t provide the level of filtering and reporting the company now needed for its staff.

Howard Malyon, the IT Manager at Grace Removals, said there were a number of problems he wanted a new solution to address:

“I wanted it to be much easier to trace problems when users reported issues with Internet access, such as slow Internet speeds or problems accessing specific sites. Plus, depending on the time of year, we have anything between 650 to 1,000 employees spread across a huge area and the ability to be able to report quickly and easily to management on Internet usage was essential.”

The Solution

After reviewing a number of solutions, Grace Removals chose the Bloxx Web filtering appliance to monitor its staff spread across 40 sites in Australia and New Zealand.

The Bloxx Web content filter is powered by Tru-View Technology which performs deep analysis of the content on a Web page at the point-of-request and before it’s displayed to a user. This provides the most up-to-the-minute protection for users and networks, increasing user productivity and saving IT teams’ time.

It also includes a reporting tool to analyse users’ Internet usage and anti-malware.

The Results

After installing and configuring the Bloxx appliance, Malyon immediately saw the benefits; the Web-use reporting and management tool that comes as standard with the Bloxx package, has greatly benefitted the company.

“There are a number of features that we find incredibly useful. The ease at which you can produce reports on user Internet activity and the confidence we can put in the information produced in the reports, is an essential element in the product for us.”

“Within the reporting and management tool, the ability to delegate administrator rights and allow department managers limited access to produce their own reports on user activity, is very useful. This frees up my time and means managers can access the information they need much more quickly. In the past it was a nightmare to have to produce an activity report for a manager, certainly one they could easily understand. The reports the Bloxx filter allows you to produce are extremely easy to generate and very simple to understand.”

“Also, it’s very straightforward to allow or deny access to specific Web sites, for instance, when a user needs to access a site which is in a category that is normally blocked according to their policy, but they need to access for specific purposes.”

When a Web filter is installed onto a corporate network, it is essential that employees are told that their Internet activity in the workplace is being observed, as Malyon explains:

“When we purchased and installed the Bloxx appliance, we had to make our users aware that their Web activity was being monitored so we revised our Acceptable Use Policy stating that a purpose built tool for the job had been implemented.”

“Now that employees know this, Internet activity has reduced, which would suggest that previous to Bloxx, we had users wasting time browsing the Web for their own interests during company time. There has been a reduction in Internet traffic as well suggesting users have reduced what they were doing knowing it now is being properly monitored. Bloxx has made it easier to determine what a user is doing with the Internet and whether their surfing is being used productively for the company or not. Previously when questioned, it was easy for a user to state they were visiting sites applicable to their work; with Bloxx we can prove exactly what a user has attempted to access at work.”

Malyon believes the Bloxx Internet filter has made this part of his job, a lot easier:

“It’s far easier to administer what activities a user can perform on the Web, produce reports on Web activity, even allow department managers to produce their own reports – none of which were possible with the old solution.”

“Comparing now to before Bloxx is like chalk and cheese. The Bloxx Web filter has been a great introduction to the company making our users aware their activity is being monitored and can be easily reported on by their managers,” concludes Malyon.