Securly_Chris

Hi, I've had a quick scan through our past support cases but can't find anything specific to Sophos MTR. Two web filters running concurrently can cause problems though and isn't recommended. If the service cannot be disabled I'd suggest getting a trial Securly account and testing it out first, we've a few different deployment method pretty sure we could find one that works well it.

I've been trialling 5G as my main Internet at home with mixed results. Vodafone were offering a good deal on unlimited data sim around the same time I was have a load of trouble with VM. Pros: Speeds typically 200-150DL/40UL Mbps Although this varies much more than fixed line - can occasionally drop as low as 30/10 at very busy times in the evenings. Seems to be true unlimited - pulling 500-600GB/month no trouble. Simple to hook up - can just use your phone to tether (I'm using a Pixel5). Cheap - Just part of my mobile contract so much cheaper than separate line. Not so good: Network not as robust - I can live with the speed changing but occasionally get periods of high packet loss which can be very disruptive. CGNAT Only - no public IPs or IPv6 on Vodafone. Might cause problems with some VPNs. No stand-alone 5G available yet, this means 5G data is piggybacking on existing 4G LTE masts. Found a big downside of this is even when the phone is set to prefer 5G services it will sometimes attach to a LTE mast with no 5G enabled. Speed drop is immediately noticeable and I have to disconnect/reconnect while waving the phone in the right direction . A dedicated 5G modem with directional external antenna might be be able to resolve this. Also have to factor in local 5G coverage. Been using it for a few months and still not entirely convinced I'll keep using it long-term.

Shouldn't that be locked up safe in the tower of London?!!

Thanks Brimstone, DGardiner - you're correct in that traditionally proxy.pac files were just used to send pretty much everything back to a proxy, maybe a few static exceptions for local servers / networks - used to do this a lot when I worked for Smoothwall. This can be tricky when off-site since you need both good upload / download bandwidth to your appliance since the path is Browser -> On Prem Proxy -> Website -> On-Prem Proxy -> Browser. Few streaming videos can max that out very quickly. Securly is different - we took advantage of PAC files since they're cross-platform, easy to centrally implement and lightweight, especially on iPads where Apple are strict about what you can do with filtering. We provide you with a ready made PAC file URL which you can deploy. Instead of pushing all traffic to a proxy, we are able to utilise our low latency cloud API within the PAC file to work out what needs to be allowed / blocked or scanned in more detail without sending all the traffic via a proxy server It can even do SSO, great for 1:1 iPads. Where we do need to intercept, HTTPS content for example, we do this in our cloud so we ensure there's enough bandwidth and resources available at all times to handle this. If you'd like to learn more one of our founders Vinay wrote an deep-dive tech article on it here; https://blog.securly.com/2020/05/02/remote-filtering-technical-deep-dive-securlys-smartpac-vs-traditional-pac-files-apples-ios-agents/ HTH - Chris

Hi, As Marc mentioned we at Securly have native cloud filtering and real-time alerts for iPads using Safari, no need to install apps, proxy, or VPN everything back to on-premise kit. We have other customers using Intune MDM for their iPads too so happy to help configure that if needed. Drop me or Marc a PM if you'd like to try it out for free.

Very true! If available you could use something like device approval in Gsuite to prevent signing in on personal devices with a school account - not sure if that's included with education GSuite accounts? In our case, to make things easier to manage Securly Chromebook extension will automatically shutdown on just a chrome browser rather than Chromebooks and you can decide whether to filter in-school only or at home.

Hi, Securly cloud filter has native support for iPads with 1:1 SSO auth built in using SmartPAC deployment. If you need an MDM to manage the devices we can include Securly MDM too which is education focused cloud based MDM. Drop me a PM and I'll be happy to provide more information or a free trial. Regards, Chris

We can sync with OUs in a Microsoft AD / Azure hybrid environment and have recently introduced custom groups on top of that. We can also now do SSO on Windows, ChromeOS, Macs and even iPads - from anywhere without any on-prem kit! As Nathan's mentioned native Azure group sync is being written at the moment. We have a shed load of new filtering features and an all new interface in the works for release later this year! Nothing officially announced yet so keep it to yourself.. Drop me a PM if you're interested in joining our tech preview programme once it's live.

Slighty different approach but I switched from dedicated VPS hosting for my personal stuff to using Amazon Lightsail. Good value and sits on AWS infrastructure. Haven't checked but you could probably get a Joomla instance too if you didn't want the hassle of maintaining your own updates. I know they do similar for Wordpress sites etc.

+1 Draytek, haven't used them recently but they used to be great value firewall/routers. Used to give these out to home working staff with pre-configured VPN on them. Much easier than messing about with client based VPN back then.

We started out with Chromebooks way back in 2012 but we can now filtered pretty much everything (not sure about smart fridges, but we'll give it a go!). We can filter Windows/Mac workstations in-school or at home same as Chromebooks. We even support Active Directory SSO for Windows domains so you don't need to sign-on to your cloud provider first! Plus you get all the usual benefits of moving from on-prem to cloud, automatic scaling to your bandwidth, no more worrying about running out of disk space for logs or what that blinking red failure light on the front of the box means. We know our customers put a lot of trust in us to provide filtering as a service, so we invest heavily in highly resilient infrastructure, auto-scaling and failover that would be extremely expensive to achieve on premise (think multiple networks, load-balancers, server clusters). Also pleased to say Securly invest heavily in people too, so I work with a great tech team! We'll never pass the buck, even if the fault lies elsewhere we'll always investigate and try to at least give some pointers where to check, as such our support feedback is consistently amongst the highest in the industry! If you ever want to give it a test drive drop me a message and I'll get you setup with a full Securly account free for 30 days.

Hi James, We're working on a number of the DfE home laptop roll-outs at the moment. Good news is we can get these deployments going in less than an hour and since we're cloud based filtering works at home or wherever the device is located! I'll drop you a PM to sync up and I can run through how our solution works in more detail. Regards, Chris

Have Microsoft updated their DNS server to support DoH? Or is this just for public DNS traffic? I've been playing around with a DNS - DoH proxy so I can can carry on using standard DNS on my internal network and DoH for anything external. Working pretty well so far!

Hey Pablo007, We have a guest/BYOD mode available on our cloud DNS filter which doesn't require certificates installing. Or a self-serve certificate installer if you decide you need HTTPS covering on BYOD too. Takes about 5 mins to setup if you want to test it out! Drop me a PM and I'll be happy help out.

Hi snagrat, Securly Filter natively supports Azure / Microsoft 365 as your identity provider. No need for 3rd party connectors or on-premise domain services, just sign-in with your Microsoft credentials and away you go! As has been mentioned Azure is different to traditional AD but you can still use policy based filtering, they've just switched from OUs to groups instead. Happy to demo how that would work in pure azure environment. Drop me or one of the team a PM. - Chris

Hey Ditto, Our Hub isn't available in the UK just yet, we're working on it though! If you need at home filtering, monitoring and parent app for school owned or managed BYOD devices though we've already got you covered, this comes included with our Filter as standard. Have you moved onto another school or working somewhere different now? -Chris

Hi Guys! Great to be supporting EduGeek! I've been long time member on these forums, I'll be around to answer any techy or product questions you might have. Feel free to PM me direct too if there's anything you don't want to share on the forum too. - Chris

Sorry Ditto, must have missed this notification!! Yes you're right! We have a free self-service Chromebook filtering solution along side our premium service - no catches. We want to help schools that might not have the budget straight away but need to protect their students online. There are differences though, you get a lot more if you choose to upgrade. Premium includes; Covers all (PC/Mac/Mobile etc) devices in-school and at home via our agentless cloud deployment. Delegated reporting and alerts to your safeguarding teams Parental controls and reports via app and portal included Monitoring of Emails / Docs and nudity detection for inappropriate file sharing. 1:1 deployment service and technical support with engineers based in the UK (No service credits needed or extra charges!) 24 Managed Safeguarding team - our in-house team monitor for high risk alerts 24/7/365. If you want to try out the premium features get in touch and we'll enable them all free for 30 days too! Cheers, Chris

Hey TechMonkey, Thanks for the feedback. We aim to keep the cloud dashboard interface simple by design - I've worked with much more complex solutions in the past and know even simple tasks would be very time consuming to carry out. That said we do much more behind the scenes; HTTPS Decryption Domain and URL along dynamic content analysis. Wildcards are supported too. Youtube restricted mode enforcement which can remove comments. Built in safeguarding monitoring with AI Sentiment Analysis Agentless configuration and Active Directory SSO We're always adding new features based on our schools feedback so give me a shout if you ever want to test out our latest platform! Kind regards, Chris

Hey Aicrd, I'm one of the techies at Securly, give me a shout if you have any questions or need any help getting it up and running. As well as Chromebooks we can also filter/monitor your Macs too through the same platform! We also work with Office365 as well as GSuite. Cheers Chris

Hi Ditto, thanks for your interest. As Roger mentioned we have a number of partners we work with the UK who can advise on options and pricing in GBP or you can contact our sales team direct at [email protected] who will be happy to help. Regards, Chris

Hi, I'm the tech manager for Securly UK, must have missed this post but thought I'd try to help with your questions. While we’re founded in the US Securly's had customers in the UK for many years now (good to see some on this thread! Hi Roger! ). We are also now based in the UK with offices in Glasgow and London. Securly is fully PREVENT compliant, as IWF members we implement the IWF CIAC blocklist, we also work with MET Police and the home office and implement their CTIRU counter-extremism blocklist. We follow UKSICs guidelines around filtering and monitoring, you can find us listed on their website under both Filtering and Monitoring providers. Regards network-level filtering, UKSIC recommend: "Network level - filtering should be applied at ‘network level’ ie, not reliant on any software on user devices". Being cloud-based Securly is very much applied at network level. We don't require software to be installed or hardware for that matter! DNS and our SmartPAC are network settings that can be distributed and enforced on your network very easily and will cover all devices, in and out of school. With over two thirds of the web being encrypted it’s also important that we support HTTPS interception. We provide managed HTTPS decryption or full decryption depending on your requirements. Either allow us to provide both dynamic content filtering and real-time monitoring of what your students are searching and posting online. Hope that helps answer your questions, please get in touch if you want to test drive and check it out for yourself! -Chris

Used Zen as home and business ISP, highly rate them. Depending on your connection/exchange you maybe still on BT backhaul but the level of service you get with Zen is well above par.

Hi Bev, Securly can provide safeguarding filtering and monitoring on your iPads. Works on and off-site too without installing any special browser or software. Drop me a quick message if you're interested? Happy to arrange a free trial for you. -Chris

I'm going to be a little bias, but just to let you know Securly can provide DNS filtering for guest networks and has support/infrastructure this side of the pond. I work on the techy side of things not sales, but if you feel like testing it out ping me a PM and I'll get an account set-up for you. Otherwise, I agree with Primus, if you have an on-prem solution already you could VLAN it into your existing filter separate from the rest of your network. I would test that you can't bounce off that filter's proxy back into the internal network and access intranet servers though. Sometimes you need to add a few rules to lock that down too! -Chris