Milton Keynes College Saves Time with Bloxx Web Content Filtering

“Whilst initially more expensive, we’ve been able to reduce the amount of time that the 3rd line team spends on Web filtering issues which over the lifetime of our contract will add up to a significant cost saving.”

Ashley Allen, Systems DBA, Milton Keynes College

Background

Milton Keynes College is at the heart of a connected and inclusive learning community. Its mission is to drive new models and partnerships to create an education landscape where there are no boundaries to limit access, progress and success.

The College has 1,000 staff and 15,000 students spread across four main sites in Milton Keynes.

The Challenge

The College used SurfControl (since taken over by Websense) for managing content filtering previously and it found its older filtering technology very time consuming to manage and its ability to identify anonymous proxy sites very basic, leaving the Internet open to abuse.

Ashley Allen, Systems DBA at the College comments:

“The list based approach meant that we constantly had to analyse traffic logs to find new anonymous proxy sites that had not been identified by SurfControl.”

This approach was no longer valid for the dynamic Internet landscape so the College looked for other Web filtering products with more advanced technology with a key aim Allen explains:

“We were hoping to greatly reduce the amount of administration time spent on Web filtering and allow greater flexibility around which groups of students were allowed to access which categories of sites.”

The Solution

The College identified the Bloxx Web Filter as fitting its key requirements and has been using it to track its 16,000 users for approximately two years.

The Bloxx Web Content Filter uses Tru-View Technology to analyse and categorise Websites in real-time providing higher levels of protection for users online, increasing productivity and minimizing network security risks.

The Results

The Bloxx Web Filter allows users to create numerous Internet access policies according to their needs and the College has several policies assigned to different user groups. Staff have their own policy and student policies are broken down by course, location and subject area – the College has around a dozen different policies active at any one time. This granularity allows the filtering to be relevant to users’ specific needs thereby minimizing support requests to block/allow sites.

Bloxx’s Tru-View Technology allows websites to be identified and categorised at the point of user request meaning that anonymous proxy sites, which have such a high proliferation, are caught immediately by our Web Filter, as Allen explains

“We obviously don’t want our students bypassing our filter through anonymizers as you have no idea what they’re surfing. The Bloxx Web Filter has been fantastic at blocking anonymous proxy sites instantly without any work from my team, leading to increased safety and security for the students and network.”

The reporting functionality is invaluable to the College, as Allen comments:

“Our students (and staff!) are now undeniably aware that if they try to access blocked sites, we will catch them!”

“We find the reporting functionality on the Bloxx appliance extremely useful. We get a report sent through every 2 hours listing all blocked access per user and if we identify large amounts of blocked activity we’ll run a more detailed report; typically this would happen two or three times a week.”

“The reporting function of the Bloxx appliance lets us automatically send out user activity reports by email. We have emails scheduled showing blocked access and this is a very useful feature; we operate a zero tolerance policy towards anonymous proxies and the emails give us all the evidence we need to remove Internet access from offenders.”

“This has had an impact on staff productivity too; we occasionally publish browse time reports for Facebook and other social networking sites – when they are released we tend to see a large drop off in the number of visits which can only be a good thing!”

Implementing the Bloxx Internet Filter has demonstrated significant time savings over the past two years for the IT team as Allen expands:

“The process for identifying and blocking users has now become much more straightforward which means that we’ve been able to pass a lot of it off to the lower level support teams, greatly freeing up 3rd line IT time.”

“Whilst initially more expensive, we’ve been able to reduce the amount of time that the 3rd line team spends on Web filtering issues which over the lifetime of our contract will add up to a significant cost saving.”

“The Bloxx appliance provides a lot more information than our previous solution, and we are confident that it is categorising the vast majority of sites correctly meaning our users and network are much better protected. Our previous Web filter was a lot more labour intensive – we would never go back.”