Exciting Opportunity need opinions

[johbreaking]

Got a very exciting opportunity, our trust is going to be taking on 3 brand new schools, 1 secondary, 2 primaries. There is a lot of moving parts at the moment but the main scope of the project which we want to try and go down a serverless route due to rising energy costs, general direction of travel in IT etc. Now intune is going to be the main driver here as we will be wanting to use AAD. My main questions which are coming out is regarding firewall and filter.

 

All sites will have minimum 1gb/1gb leased line with secondary school maybe having 10gb bearer. We want something which will really be offsite so either thinking speaking with ISPs to get this bundled in or looking at something like securely and then firewall! So just want any idea that people would do in this situation or anything I might have missed

 

TIA

[localzuk]

One thing to consider is that the KCSIE guidelines expect "network level" filtering. The way we have handled this here is to buy Smoothwalll and their hybrid cloud solution. So, we have 2 appliances onsite that handle all the filtering for our Trust, and also have the Smoothwall Chrome extension installed on all our Chromebooks for devices that go offsite. There are also options for other operating systems as well.

 

Honestly, I would be looking at building a proper internet solution with a single ISP. That way, you can link your schools to a single filter, either one they provide or one they host for you etc... It would potentially mean a single ISP hosted firewall as well.

[johbreaking]

One thing to consider is that the KCSIE guidelines expect "network level" filtering. The way we have handled this here is to buy Smoothwalll and their hybrid cloud solution. So, we have 2 appliances onsite that handle all the filtering for our Trust, and also have the Smoothwall Chrome extension installed on all our Chromebooks for devices that go offsite. There are also options for other operating systems as well.

 

Honestly, I would be looking at building a proper internet solution with a single ISP. That way, you can link your schools to a single filter, either one they provide or one they host for you etc... It would potentially mean a single ISP hosted firewall as well.

 

Very interesting point with the KCSIE guidelines, so anything with lets say extension based filtering would fall foul of this, is there any links to this.

 

ISP is my preferred route with this more think about it.

[localzuk]

Very interesting point with the KCSIE guidelines, so anything with lets say extension based filtering would fall foul of this, is there any links to this.

 

ISP is my preferred route with this more think about it.

 

KCSIE sends you to the Safer Internet site, who handle that part of the guidance. Its linked in the KCSIE guidance but the latest version is here - https://saferinternet.org.uk/blog/2023-appropriate-filtering-and-monitoring-definitions-published-for-public-consultation

 

The specific bit is in the linked "Appropriate Filtering for Education Settings" document.