Grace Christian School deploys web filtering solution

Grace Christian School is providing its students and staff with a safer and more secure IT environment, thanks to a web filtering and anonymous proxy prevention solution.

The school is located at Bunbury in Western Australia and is a member of the Christian Schools Australia network. Grace maintains strict policies on internet use and the security of students online is an absolute priority.

The school was faced with replacing several outdated IT devices. It went looking for a replacement that could consolidate the functions of the old devices into one solution, and that would be cost effective and easy to use and manage.

Grace decided to trial Netbox Blue’s SecurED all-in-one solution. The solution includes a firewall, email and URL filtering, reporting, as well as social network monitoring and controls.

The solution also features LAN segregation; students and teachers are effectively on separate networks for external access, which brings security and management advantages.

Grace Christian School now has a consolidated internet and email security and management solution that covers its current needs, and is able to grow with the school as it moves towards a 1:1 student to laptop ratio. It can also help control access to social networking with SafeChat, if the school decides to make use of this area of the internet.

The IT Manager at the school, Garry Hewett, said, “It has solved our IT issues and has a much more user-friendly interface than other products we looked at.

“The product does everything we expected of it. The filtering products are quite sophisticated.

“The solution appears to be very stable with excellent reporting of the state of the interfaces. We never knew our ADSL fluctuated so much [before implementing the solution],” Hewett said.