Case Study - Durban Girl’s College
Company: Durban Girl’s College
Location: South Africa
Industry: Education
Number of employees: 90
Product in use: GFI WebMonitor™
Quick Read
Durban Girl’s College, located in Durban KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa is a private school for girls with weekly boarding facilities. The school wanted to implement web monitoring software for three main reasons: to protect students and staff from illicit websites; to manage their internet cap and to balance internet productivity and recreation. Having tried other web monitoring solutions, none of which they found to be successful, they opted for GFI WebMonitor after it was recommended by another user.
Challenges
Durban Girl’s College was established in 1877 in South Africa as a private school for girls and it strives for excellence. Having high expectations of their staff and students, the school wanted to protect their IT network from illicit and inappropriate material that can be accessed on the internet.
Mr. Nolan Venkiah, the school’s Network Manager explained that there were three reasons why the school chose to implement a web monitoring system. These were: “the need to protect our learners and staff from questionable sites and content; to appropriately manage our internet cap through the month; and to manage internet productivity vs. recreation”
The school looked into various web monitoring solutions trying out products like “Burstek, Websense and Dan’s Guardian. The first two products met our requirements however exceeded our budget and the other required manual management,” said Mr. Venkiah. “We found GFI WebMonitor to be a far more superior product not to mention also cost-effective.”
Implementation
Having had problems with the previously-tested solutions, Mr. Venkiah found that GFI WebMonitor didn’t give him any installation problems or drain server resources. In fact, the product integrated seamlessly with the existing setup and proved to be easy to configure and manage.
“The software was impressively simple to implement especially on a critical server like our ISA server and in fact uses such little server resource that it’s hard to believe that it’s even running. The seamless cutover from the trial version to the full version was only a serial key difference thus making the presentation of a proof of concept to decision makers a simple task that is without cost.”
As an educational institution, the school also benefited from GFI’s pricing for this category customer. “GFI’s generosity allowed us to implement a world class solution across a 900-user site for a fraction of the cost of their competitors as well at a fraction of their own cost.”
Benefits
The implementation of GFI WebMonitor allowed Durban College to provide a safer and more secure browsing environment, blocking all sites deemed inappropriate for the student body using the network. The security features of GFI WebMonitor also added safeguards against infection from viruses and malware that could be downloaded while browsing.
“It has helped us because the filtering and categorization database as well as the antivirus suites are upgraded automatically thereby blocking out sites that learners are vulnerable to visiting. It is also a safeguard against policy violations and also a means to uphold the staff internet policy and ultimately it takes the risk out of unsupervised browsing,” said Mr. Venkiah.
A very good feature found in GFI WebMonitor is that which gives administrators the ability to block access to sites for specific groups, rather than have a blanket ban for everyone. It’s also possible to block certain features within a webpage, for example, all .wmv files can be blocked so that streaming will not be permitted, even if the audio or video clip appears within a webpage.
“WebMonitor makes perfect sense when it comes to implementing an internet access control technology in a domain that has various access level requirements. Its ability to allow browsing to certain users, groups and IP addresses allows us to have a multi-tiered security environment for internet access that makes managing access to the internet so much easier and less of a headache.”
“With GFI WebMonitor we benefited immediately by being able to block “proxy and anonymizer” sites for learners; this was not possible with our previous Internet Access Control software. We are now able to disable streaming media that was embedded in unassuming sites that secretly gnawed away at our internet cap in the past. We were able to pull up quick reports of the highest users as well as the top policy breakers and sanction those users accordingly as described in our internet access policy. The results were immediate!”
The benefits were evident in terms of computer performance as the school’s internet cap was being controlled and they were now able to limit the amount of downloads. There were also financial benefits in terms of both the savings on bandwidth as well as the software solution which is cheaper than its market competitors.
“It has been an immensely cost effective solution because it saved us up to 45% on our renewal cost of the previous software we used and more than 200% on other competitor software”
Target Reached
“We were consuming up to 3.5GB of upload and download unaccounted for data per day on a 50GB cap but since implementing GFI we’re now consuming 1.8GB per day that is completely accounted for,” said Mr. Venkiah.
“It has saved me time in that policy creation and implementation is simple and is immediate and has raised the ire of policy breakers in our organization.”
Links
For further information about GFI WebMonitor please visit: http://www.gfi.com/webmon. For your free trial download visit: http://www.gfi.com/pages/webmon-selection-download.asp
November 2009