NetSpective Case Studies

NetSpective Internet Content Filter Helps East Baton Rouge Parish School System Keep 45,000 Students in Cyber Safety

Computer technology and network communications are revolutionizing the K-12 educational environment. Increasingly, blackboards and chalk are giving way to PowerPoint presentations, wikis, videoconferencing and teacher-student blogging. This transformation is in full force at Louisiana's East Baton Rouge Parish School System (EBRPSS), which serves the Greater Baton Rouge area. EBRPSS encompasses 88 elementary, middle and high schools serving approximately 45,000 students. EBRPSS is the largest K-12 school district in Louisiana and among the top 75 districts by enrollment in the United States.

The Challenge

Although the Internet is a valuable educational tool, there is an ongoing need to protect students from objectionable content and other online threats. Enacted in 2000, the Federal Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is intended to address concerns about Internet access to offensive content via school and library computers. In addition to Internet safety policy and education initiatives, CIPA requires facilities to implement technology that blocks or filters Internet access to obscenity, child pornography and other content potentially harmful to minors. Failure to comply with CIPA bars a facility from accessing the $2.25 billion of information technology funding and discounts available annually under the Federal E-rate program.

The EBRPSS network spans 89 locations with more than 25,000 PCs, 350 file servers, 3000 peripherals and 2500 networking devices. Individual sites connect to a central hub location via 100 Mbps Metro Ethernet links. The Cisco-based network also features a 1 Gbps backbone and a 250 Mbps Internet connection. EBRPSS required an Internet content filtering solution that ensured CIPA compliance, without incurring an impractical burden on the district's IT staff and budget. Beyond Internet content filtering, the IT team is responsible for delivering an aggressive information technology program that includes voice and video communications, e-mail, video on demand, educational resources, administrative systems and network security measures.

The NetSpective Solution

East Baton Rouge Parish School System chose the Tolly-certified NetSpective® Content Filter as their Internet filtering solution. The NetSpective Internet Content Filter appliance eliminates undesirable traffic and maximizes network availability, security and performance. NetSpective's SideScanTM technology delivers wire-speed traffic control with fail-over and/or fail-open reliability.

EBRPSS deployed the NetSpective Internet Content Filter appliance in a redundant "hot spare" configuration, augmented with NetSpective's NetAuditorTM usage monitoring and reporting tool.

The NetSpective Internet Content Filter is configured to block objectionable material targeted by CIPA, including pornography and hate speech. The appliance also restricts access to sites with a high bandwidth, network security or productivity impact, such as anonymous proxies, web mail, voice over IP, streaming media, peer to peer, entertainment, games, shopping and social networking (such as Facebook and MySpace).

"We currently have 45,000 students in cyber safety, plus more than 7000 employees and 25,000 PCs across the 89 sites in our network", said Jesse Noble, Chief Technology Officer. "Prior to getting NetSpective, we did not have any consolidated networking between locations and each school handled its own connectivity. We started with NetSpective in 1999, shortly after we received E-rate funding for our district wide area network. We picked NetSpective due its ability to control our network traffic and also for the value it offered. We really like NetSpective's appliance format -- it's easy to use, requires a minimal effort from our staff and there is no extra server hardware to worry about."

"We've been extraordinarily pleased with NetSpective. It was up and running in 15 minutes and ever since, it's been a set and forget system."

"We've actually selected NetSpective twice. A few years after our initial installation, we switched to a content filtering product that was part of another vendor's security suite. We thought we could save money with the bundle but we were wrong. It was a management nightmare and we needed a full-time staff person to manage the content filtering. We switched back to NetSpective as soon as we could."

Benefits

NetSpective Benefit: Easy CIPA Compliance

NetSpective makes it easy for the school system to achieve its primary objective, ongoing CIPA compliance. Since 2000, NetSpective content filtering has helped EBRPSS qualify for millions of dollars in E-rate incentives. "We just went through a stringent six-month CIPA and E-rate attestation audit. NetSpective content filtering and reporting gave us the tools we needed to implement and audit CIPA-mandated policies and maintain compliance."

NetSpective Benefit: Enhanced Network Security

NetSpective policy enforcement and auditing capabilities are a valuable network security tool for EBRPSS. "NetSpective allows us to effectively block access to anonymous proxies, peer-to-peer apps, webmail and other risky sites. We need to be sure we don't have students or other users getting around our filtering policies or accessing illegal or malicious content. Also, NetSpective reporting helps detect unusual traffic that might indicate a network security issue, such as a zombie machine."

NetSpective Benefit: Ease of Use and IT Time Savings

NetSpective delivers the ease of use and manageability required by EBRPSS. "We're very happy with NetSpective's ease of use, and the NetSpective appliance is simple to install and maintain. I have 53 IT people on my team, and they have a lot to do. The other content filtering system we used needed a full-time person to manage it. I don't want to have to pull someone away from other tasks just to manage content filtering. Compared to NetSpective, that system required a lot of extra work. NetSpective is smooth and reliable, and that helps us a lot."

"NetSpective is very reliable and is a set and forget solution. It also makes it easy to override filtering policies when we have an authorized request. We need that kind of flexibility to address special educational requirements and also to appropriately address the 10,000 web pages we manage for various district, departmental and teacher needs."

"I want to stress how happy I've been with the NetSpective tech support. It's really rare we have an issue, and those we've had were fixed within minutes. The NetSpective technical group is really good at what they do."

NetSpective Benefit: Reduced Bandwidth Waste,

NetSpective Internet Content Filter allows EBRPSS to limit access to wasteful, bandwidth-intensive services such as web-based TV, streaming audio, peer to peer and more. "Our bandwidth use would explode if we didn't have NetSpective controls in place. For example, during the Presidential Inauguration we had an educational need to temporarily allow access to streaming news video. Almost immediately, our 250 MbpsInternet connection was completely saturated. Obviously there was an educational justification that day, but we'd face those congestion issues every day if we didn't have NetSpective available to clamp down on nonessential access."

NetSpective Benefit: System Reliability, Enhanced Network Performance

NetSpective delivers effective network controls for EBRPSS without creating a potential point of failure or bottleneck. "NetSpective is very reliable, and that's critical for us. Also, we briefly used another content filtering product and found it to be a resource hog that choked our network pipe. With NetSpective and its SideScan filtering, we get control with no degradation to our 250 Mb network connection."

NetSpective Benefit: Better Network Intelligence

NetSpective's NetAuditor reporting provides EBRPSS with complete information on network activity. "We really like the NetAuditor reports. Every day I'm looking at reports on top users, anomalies and excessive usage. It's also easy for us to pull information ad hoc as needed by auditors, general counsel, law enforcement or network admins. We've had emergencies where we needed to research a student's online activity and the NetAuditor reports were extremely helpful."

Summary

"NetSpective offers a lot of value, and that appealed to us right from the start. Over the last ten years, NetSpective has been an extremely effective solution for us. Anyone that needs Internet content filtering should take a serious look at NetSpective. It's been a reliable and outstanding solution, plus it's very cost-effective."