Broadband, Firewall & Filter renewal due. What to Choose?

[krb548]

I currently reviewing our broadband supplier and firewall/filtering device as they are up for renewal in a few months.

Currently we have Virgin Media with 1Gb/1Gb line and 2x Smoothwalls running in failover plus also using their cloud filtering and also have Netsupport School Cloud software.

 

Im thinking about a new line 2Gb/10Gb plus 1Gb/1Gb for failover.

 

Im considering moving away from Virgin as service & support is bad at the moment and BT are easiliy undercutting their prices.

 

Im struggling to decided what to do about the firewalls & filtering. I have a price from Smoothwall for an S15 appliance but not fully convinced this is best way for future especially if school grows and needs to look after more schools.

 

It has been suggested to use either a Fortigate or PaloAlto box and then use Smoothwall Cloud Filtering to protect devices in & out of school keeping with the Net Support offering to help pick up on phrases being typed in Word/teams etc.

 

We have approx 500+ devices using the web in school and majority are InTune registered. There are also a number of school devices that also used in the home environment that still need to be protected.

 

BT at the moment appear to be offering a good 1 stop shop for the whole soultion.

 

What are other schools using and what would you recommend?

[SchoolsBroadband]

Being some what biased I'd recommend our own hosted FortiGate platform where you get your own virtual iced FortiGate which can also be in a HA pair.

 

We can give you carrier diversity using BT for one connection and Virgin for another inc auto fail over.

 

You can then add on our hosted FortiAnaylzer for advanced analytics and we'll also include our our safety incident management platform which takes FortiGate real-time logs and presents all esafety breaches and possible breaches back to you and you Digital safeguarding lead in an easy to use interface.

 

Using hosted FortiGate means no big capital costs for hardware, just an annual amount.

 

I'm sure we would beat BTs and Virgin pricing direct and with our value add services on top it should be quite compelling, particularly for big bamdwidths.

 

Finally, we also partner with a lot of Altnets and have some very special pricing with some of the. On speeds of 2Gbps a d above so if they're available then you could get even better value and / or faster speeds.

 

Do PM me if interested. We've a lot of large MATs paint this solution with speeds of 10gbps to each secondary school

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[dapaulio]

Have you looked in to vodaphone who we have found to have a stable network and we have been commissioning there circuit in to all schools up for renewal with their current provider For about 3 to 4 years now. touch wood not even experienced a hiccup of any sort.

 

Personally I wouldn’t recommend SBB as out of all the schools we have, where they still are or have been, we seem to have the most issues upstream and most problems with support. Granted you don’t have many yourself but it is more than your competitors who don’t have any that I have experience in the last several years.

[Wave9_Lee]

Hi Keith,

 

Appreciate you're waiting for community replies rather than suppliers, but if you would like a comparative quote from us at Wave 9 or any futher info/demo, let me know, be happy to oblige. We offer DIA from a large range of providers and primarily utilise Sophos for firewall/filtering/security.

 

cheers

[mdrabble]

We were previously/currently with M247 on a 1GB/1gb connection.

 

Signed with Wave9 to use an AltNet 2gb/10gb connction - this was due to have been done and dusted back in Jan, but due to issues outside of Wave9 control things have taken time.

 

Main work was completed quite quickly by sadly we had 7 blockages on the run to the street cabinet which brought things to halt.

 

Credit to Wave9, they have kept me in be loop and kept pressure on to get this resolved asap.

 

Work was due to take place last week to clear these blockages but as I’m currently away for the week and have poor internet I’ve not check on things.

 

So would recommend Wave9 for broadband.

 

Filtering - this was a big surprise to me as we have smoothwall which is due to end at the end of May.

 

Had demos and trials of different solutions, had head, DSL and assistant DSL in for all demos etc and they opted for Fortinet with the RepLog safeguarding option from SwitchShop.

 

SwitchShop were great in the process - they were not the cheapest but they offered a solution the Head and DSL people liked.

 

Hope that helps.

[tom_newton]

You could probably get better value combining smoothwall filter and monitor, then you would not need netsupport. The S15 will give you excellent headroom to grow, particularly as in time some parts of the filter work are offloaded to on-device, and the reporting into the cloud.

 

If you want to chat it through I am happy to set up a google meet next week when I return from our Perth office.