Firewall and Flitering Options

[commtech]

Hi Guys,

 

Looking to see what people are using for Firewall and Filtering, got a school on a strict budget looking to seperate themselves from a ajoining school, everything else is planned, but i am wondering what people are using for firewall and filtering.

 

Have looked at costs of Sonicwall, Barracuda and Lightspeed.

 

Any comments well but no sales calls please

[Andy2789]

We recently went it alone with our broadband. We went with Smoothwall for our filtering and firewall through an S8 appliance. Smoothwall were really good and worked with us on the price, which gave us a great solution.

[rogerdnixon]

If you use G Suite or Azure AD you might want to consider Securly which is what we use. Some rather cool parental reporting and offsite filtering options with no local appliance to go wrong. We have used it for the last year and its pretty good.

[NetworkNinja]

+1 For smoothwall

 

Great Service and price

[Wave9_Lee]

You might want to also consider Sophos - good filter & Firewall, good pricing.

[Blue_Cookeh]

We went with Sophos when we did this 3 years ago. Loved the Sophos UTM (NOT XG) software and would recommend it. We only stopped using it because we got Lightspeed and FortiGate with our SchoolsBroadband connection.

 

FWIW Smoothwall were quoting prices 4 or 5 times that of Sophos.

[AlanD]

Top of you list should be to meet the "prevent" strategy - because you are required to do that by law (or...at least if not actually a law....you would come in for heavy criticism at least...and at worst inspectors would have a field day...)

 

The prevent strategy does not actually require you to filter...(but you probably would want to filter obviously)...but does require you to monitor usage and identify that usage to individuals according to categories including "self abuse"...."radicilisation" ....etc and you need to be able to report on that.

 

Almost certainly you would need to be able to demonstrate that filtering is "age appropriate"...simply banning loads of categories from everyone is not good enough you need to be show that older students for example - might be allowed access to some material - possibly with a warning page...and that might include unmoderated pages like Pinterest which you would have to block for younger students.

 

Filtering - can be done for free - with stuff pfsense and guardian etc....or may be part of packages like Sophos....but rarely so these meet the prevent strategy without a lot of work on behalf of a network manager.

[Opendium_Steve]

The prevent strategy does not actually require you to filter...(but you probably would want to filter obviously)...but does require you to monitor usage and identify that usage to individuals according to categories including "self abuse"...."radicilisation" ....etc and you need to be able to report on that.

 

The DfE's "Keeping children Safe In Education" statutory guidance certainly does require both filtering and monitoring. The guidance itself is fairly wishy-washy, but the UK Safer Internet Centre have published a good interpretation of it. In particular, you *have* to block websites that are on the IWF and CTIRU lists.

 

Filtering - can be done for free - with stuff pfsense and guardian etc....or may be part of packages like Sophos....but rarely so these meet the prevent strategy without a lot of work on behalf of a network manager.

 

A lot of schools have realised they aren't meeting the requirements that were introduced last summer. A not-insignificant number of those schools were running free filters and had come to the conclusion that none of the free filters could meet the new requirements, which is why they had started shopping around for commercial ones.

Edited July 18, 2017 by elsiegee40

[elsiegee40]

The DfE's "Keeping children Safe In Education" statutory guidance certainly does require both filtering and monitoring. The guidance itself is fairly wishy-washy, but the UK Safer Internet Centre have published a good interpretation of it. In particular, you *have* to block websites that are on the IWF and CTIRU lists.

KCC's @esafety_officer has produced really good guidance on the implications for schools of "Keeping Children Safe in Education" which can be found here

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/e-safety/171051-online-safety-within-keeping-children-safe-education-2016-published-26-5-16-a.html

[Opendium_Steve]

KCC's @esafety_officer has produced really good guidance on the implications for schools of "Keeping Children Safe in Education" which can be found here

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/e-safety/171051-online-safety-within-keeping-children-safe-education-2016-published-26-5-16-a.html

 

I read that excellent piece last summer and it was good to reread, so thanks for pointing at it.

 

The guidance isn't terribly prescriptive about the technologies that schools should use for filtering and monitoring, so it's more or less a case that almost anything goes if the school can justify it. However, there have been enough third party interpretations published, such as the one you pointed at and the Safer Internet Centre's that really a school is going to struggle to justify deviating significantly from those interpretations.

 

Certainly, I think that in the event that a serious incident did happen, things wouldn't go well for the school if someone was able to point at a widely accepted "best practice" interpretation of the guidance and ask why they were falling way short of it.