NetSpective Case Studies

NetSpective Internet Content Filter Helps Missouri Department of Transportation Enforce Rules of the Road

The Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) oversees the seventh largest transportation network in the United States. The department is responsible for $26 billion in capital assets, a $2 billion annual budget, 32,000 miles of highway, 10,000 bridges, plus aviation, riverport, railroad, mass transit, bicycle and pedestrian networks. For each of these resources, MoDOT strives to deliver uninterrupted traffic flows, safety, efficiency, accessibility and the best return on investment.

Managing these diverse networks requires efficient communication between MoDOT's 300 locations and 5000 employees statewide. To this end, the department's centralized data network features a shared 200Mb Internet connection, fiber links to regional hubs, multiple frame relay segments and extensive VPN/SoHo remote access pathways. Just like the department's physical highway, air, rail and waterway networks, MoDOT's computer network must also deliver uninterrupted traffic flow, safety, efficiency, accessibility and superior ROI.

Key Content Filtering Challenges

MoDOT's management team recognized inappropriate Internet activity could incur unwanted legal, expense and productivity risks. They also needed to ensure network traffic complied with various regulatory, contractual and security policies.

"We needed to ensure our network traffic was legitimate and avoid a situation where pornography, illegal music downloads or other inappropriate activity created the potential for a lawsuit or unwanted publicity. As a government agency, we also need to document communications and comply with applicable regulations and contracts. This meant we needed to control unauthorized chat, instant messaging and voice over IP traffic. Finally, we were concerned about network security risks that could result from users downloading content from personal webmail or hacking websites."

While MoDOT saw the need for Internet content filtering, reliable Internet access was a priority. "Filtering is very important to us, but if something goes wrong we need to ensure people still have connectivity."

The NetSpective Solution

The Missouri Department of Transportation chose the Tolly-certified NetSpective Internet Content Filter as their Internet filtering solution. The NetSpective Internet Content Filter appliance eliminates undesirable traffic and maximizes data network availability, security and performance. NetSpective's SideScanTM technology delivers wire-speed traffic control with fail-over and/or fail-open reliability.

MoDOT deployed the NetSpective Internet Content Filter appliance in a redundant configuration to control inappropriate Web, peer-to-peer, instant messaging and VoIP traffic. They augmented this with NetSpective's NetAuditor™ usage monitoring and reporting tool.

Customer Benefit: Abuse Prevention

NetSpective Internet Content Filter helps MoDOT prevent and deter undesirable Internet activity. "Most of our people are pretty well-trained to not use unapproved websites and such. Still, sometimes we have consultants come in with their own laptop or somebody accesses from home over the VPN. If people try to view unapproved content or get around filtering with an anonymous proxy, we can easily block the traffic, warn the user or get an alert by e-mail. Aside from preventing abuse, NetSpective also helps us with public relations -- how would it look to the taxpayer if the DOT was sued for downloading illegal songs?"

Customer Benefit: Bandwidth Savings

"Peer-to-peer, unauthorized VoIP and instant messaging started to use up a lot of bandwidth and fill people's hard drives. NetSpective makes it easy for us to block unwanted services, while also letting us allow things like our internal VoIP and NetMeeting traffic."

Customer Benefit: Reliability

"I like that NetSpective is a purpose-built filtering appliance and we really like the SideScanTM out-of-band filtering technology. Reliable Internet connectivity is a humongous consideration for us -- even though we've never had the NetSpective system go down, its 'fail-over and fail-open' capabilities are a lot better for our needs."

Customer Benefit: Enhanced Network Security

"Although we have intrusion detection and other things on our network, we've found NetSpective Internet Content Filter to be a benefit for information security. NetSpective makes it easy to get alerts on people using unauthorized VoIP, P2P, chat, hacking websites and other risky things that scare us to death. Also, we started blocking webmail because it was a way for people to download directly into our systems and potentially get around security devices and protocols."

Customer Benefit: Legal and Regulatory Compliance

"As a government agency, we're required to keep records on communications. Also, we run our own VoIP and have special regulations with our telecom providers. With NetSpective, we can avoid problems by blocking unauthorized VoIP and messaging services. We can also block peer-to-peer downloads and other things that could lead to a copyright violation or lawsuit."

Customer Benefit: Ease of Use

"I like the NetSpective interface and find it provides a lot of control while still being easy-to-use. We also like NetSpective's 'micro-updates' feature -- we want our categorization to be very accurate and we need to keep the data fresh. NetSpective's quick review with daily and hourly updates for new sites results in less miscommunication and hopefully heads off user complaints."

"We like that we can register users with NetSpective without requiring them to enter a username and password - NetSpective uses LDAP to directly access user information on our Active Directory server. This is less intrusive for our users and makes it easy for us to apply group policies. It's also allowed us to get much more granular in traffic reporting by users and groups. Our investigators have an easy time filtering NetAuditor reports and getting the information they need."

Summary

"We are absolutely getting the results we need with NetSpective. The categorization is up to snuff, we've never had a system failure and the tech support and sales staff are proactive and easy to work with. With NetSpective we get cost effective control, manageability and a good value."