Filter / Firewall Replacement

[rlculver]

Hi,

 

Please may I have some recommendations on a new filter / firewall solutions for a small Special school.

 

I prefer a 'hardware' based firewall, in order to DfE requirements.

 

Please forward your comments .

 

Thanks

[Jcx500]

Smoothwall or Sophos xg

[Wave9_Lee]

Smoothwall or Sophos xg

 

I'm happy to recommend a Sophos XG and provide some pricing if you'd like.

 

Drop me a PM if interested!

 

regards

 

Lee

[SchoolsBroadband]

Fortinet with Forticoud is good and complies fully with DFE guidelines. Happy to quote if you want to send me a PM?

 

See https://login.forticloud.com/samlsplash?redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.forticloud.com%2Floginmgrlogin&response_type=code&service_id=forticloudglobal-4TCPXs1dLST1bRp2UuTmkffruyUBvpSS.forticloud.com&access_type=offline

 

and

 

https://www.fortinet.com/products/next-generation-firewall.html

 

Dave

[dobsondeeping]

SonicWall and/or Smoothwall would probably be worth a look

[ibpalle]

With obvious bias, Smoothwall will be worth a look. Not just for firewall and webfiltering but the add-ons for monitoring could also be interesting in this context to consolidate services a bit.

[mavhc]

All firewalls are software.

[TechMonkey]

All firewalls are software.

 

Not in construction, which is on a similar level of relevance to the thread.

 

On topic: It does depend on your requirements. I've used Smoothwall for longer than I care to remember and although not perfect I do think that it is best suited for a school out of the majority of the systems I've seen. Though it may be better suited with to schools with a dedicated, technical team. The biggest difference in my experience is the dynamic content filtering, rather than just being a URL filter. In the corporate world it is much easier to say I don't want access to these sites or these types of content and 95% be covered. In education though we have to be a bit more proactive/flexible, thinking of KCSIE, so if a topic comes up within a page, it has to be evaluated as well.

 

I'm not saying none of the other systems are suitable for a school. So Sophos, which I've looked at, looks fantastic and if you have a Sophos ecosystem will tie in brilliantly. You can show people graphs of users, number of blocks and the like, analyse what is being looked at and my feeling is it is a much more hands off set up and ignore system (I may be incorrect).

 

But my opinion is that Smoothwall does the core of what we want, filtering nasties, better because of the dynamic content filtering. Now lets not forget the elephant in the room, generally reports are rubbish, but the safeguarding email is brilliant and our DSL is extremely happy with it and I know when people have come to take a look at our safeguarding they are impressed with it and that we have that capability. And this is why I say having a dedicated (not dedicated to Smoothwall alone), technical team suits Smoothwall better because they will be able to craft the reports and produce them, whereas I would hate my DSL to even have to look at the reporting section, let alone create one. Also being geared towards Education means they understand and react quickly to issues schools are facing. So I have often found their standard block lists already contain sites people are talking about manually blocking. My experience is that filtering systems geared to more corporate settings just don't apply the resources to keeping the lists up-to-date

 

The new cloud reporting changes do look fantastic, as long as they are implemented properly, and I think Smoothwall are getting back on an even keel after having some major wobbles. This time last year I would probably have been writing something else.

 

So the TL;DR is list your requirements and pick a few of the big contenders and see if they meet those requirements and match the ones you/the school feel are top priority.