CyberHound Replacement

[BFish]

Hi everyone,

 

It's been a while since I have posted here. Our school has had a rough run this year with Cyberhound that involved a few months of a corrupted database, having the firewall crash on a weekly basis and requiring a reboot, and a broken sync between two firewalls that somehow went unnoticed for a lengthy time. I was hopeful that things would improve but just watched another botched upgrade where the school's firewall was down in the dark for the whole weekend when we had a bandwidth upgrade scheduled and essentially I had to pay OT to 6 staff members who couldn't perform their job as we had to postpone the bandwidth upgrade. It's been frustrating to say the least as the company normally has good reviews from other customers I have talked too.

 

I have come to the disappointed conclusion that it is time to begin the lengthy search for a new Firewall company and wanted to get your opinions. Our school is about 1600 students, 400 staff, and we run a true BYOD setup involving iPads, mobile devices, Chromebooks, Macs & Windows. We are a top tiered British curriculum school on the international circuit. Our biggest priorities are security and alerts. Currently, we have it setup so that if certain keywords are searched it automatically notifies key staff members as well as more general reports of violations every week/month to year leaders. This was one advantage of CyberHound that I feel will be difficult to find an alternative since it's a BYOD. If it was a 1:1 school provided solution then I would easily look at an application solution.

 

The second is security, which is a huge focal point at a high admin level. We are looking for the ability to get advanced usage reports, very customized web and application filtering levels, bandwidth metering, and an IPS/IDS to protect all the devices inside.

 

I have used Fortinet before (not a fan of their reporting features) and Palo Alto (loved it, but is it worth the price in an EDU environment?). I just wanted to get your thoughts or recommendations.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Big fortinet fans and partners here. Take fortianalyzer as well and you get a bucket load of reports as well as the ability to customise your own

 

 

Dave