Lightspeed Relay

[LewRichAIM]

Afternoon,

 

I am in the process of reviewing our filtering platform for two secondary schools. We currently use Smoothwall but it's a bit pricey and slow when running reports. I am looking at Lightspeed Relay. I have had a bit of a demo and it looks intuitive. However a few reports on here about missing features and slow support. Also interested in how people are using the Relay Rocket VM for the likes of captive portal and devices that don't support the agent. Anyone using it across multiple schools feedback appreciated!

 

Thanks,

 

Lewis

[paulkerton]

Have you also looked at Securly, which is a very similar product to Relay?

[Securly_Marc]

Thanks, Paul!

 

Happy to arrange a demo to show you Securly, Lewis - Just give me a shout.

 

Marc

[tom_newton]

Smoothwall's reporting is moving to the cloud - would love to chat to you about this so you don't need to consider moving - happy to hear what we can do to make your lives easier.

[Opendium_Steve]

I am looking at Lightspeed Relay. I have had a bit of a demo and it looks intuitive. However a few reports on here about missing features and slow support.

I can't comment on Lightspeed, but if you're looking for high quality support I think pretty much all our customers will vouch for us. Let me know if you'd like a quote/demo - our annual customer retention rate is over 97% so we must be doing something right

[GameOfGPOs]

We’re a MAT of 11 schools - growing to 20 this year, with roughly 7000 users so far and recently moved to the LS Relay platform having been on a tenancy setup of Smoothwall. Just to mention, I have nothing bad to say about Smoothwall.

 

First off, ask for a trial period to play around with the portal, smart agents and reporting to get a feel for rolling out updates and possibilities of what you can filter. That really helped us make our decision to move away from a typical setup.

 

We sync our single AD structure with Lightspeed - spend some time planning it out. You want to use security groups in OUs grouped together to make filter changes easy across levels.

 

Agent works well across all devices. Only issue I’ve had was with iOS 13.1 breaking the agent when it tried to update leaving the device with no connectivity.

 

Relay Rocket - your main question. We run 4 in a cluster on VMware virtualisation - not had a single problem with them. We run 3 clustered as the transparent base filtering and set as the DNS across every client network as a backup. We then have 1 solely setup for captive portal guest networks/BYOD. You will need a wildcard SSL certificate to apply to the VMs. Anything with an agent ignores the rockets unless the agent fails and we block port 53 DNS outbound to anything other than our rockets so you can’t get unfiltered net by changing device DNS setting (the relay rockets forward any internal domain dns to your domain controllers).

 

Your main challenge with the rockets will be how you plan to get any BYOD to the captive portal. Apple and Windows devices seem to redirect naturally. Android not so much - I just trick our WiFi into serving its captive portal page but edited the webpage so it redirects to the rocket instead.

 

Speaking to them at BETT - they were heavily US based and chromebook centric until about a year or so ago. The UK side has received investment recently and development is being ramped up with plenty of features on the way (proxy based filtering, more Windows agent features). Drop me a PM if you want to chat.

 

P.s - the Safety Check feature is currently just for chromebooks but will be released for Windows soon meaning safeguarding monitoring and filtering will be in one place for one price.

[Opendium_Steve]

First off, ask for a trial period to play around with the portal, smart agents and reporting to get a feel for rolling out updates and possibilities of what you can filter. That really helped us make our decision to move away from a typical setup.

 

Going a bit off topic here, but whilst trials are probably fairly easy with cloud filtering systems that use an on-device agent (like LS Relay), what are peoples' feelings about trials for on-premises UTM devices?

 

We've tended to shy away from trials for our on-prem systems, because UTM type devices are quite heavily integrated into networks so there's always a reasonable amount of work and disruption involved in installing/replacing them. It usually doesn't seem worth going through all that for a short trial, and most schools seem happy with a guided tour through a demo server instead. That said we've done a few on-prem trials recently, and they have been ok when the school's ICT staff are on the ball.

 

Thoughts?