ContentWatch in Salt Lake City, Utah offers ContentProtect, a web content filtering solution.
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Securly Filter
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Cloud-based web filtering for K-12 Schools | Parental controls for families | Manage screen time. Any device, anywhere. Securly's technology allows schools and parents to keep kids safe in an increasingly digital world. The vendor states their goal is not to censor the Internet, but to mitigate the negative effects it can have on children with the goal of creating a safer world for kids. Their cloud-based web filter is designed to keep…
If you are looking for something relatively inexpensive to lock down specific computers, it would be a useful tool. If the computers themselves aren't too locked down, implementation and management shouldn't be too difficult.
As I stated earlier, if you have iPads in a 1 to 1 usage, [Securly Filter] is your best filter. Students cannot break it or mess with any settings on a device that has an MDM setup.
Our primary policy is a restricted list, so that does as advertised. We had one location that had blocks based on categories (adult, illegal, etc). We continually had issues with sites getting completely blocked due to unrelated content. For example, Yahoo had a beer ad on the page, alcohol was blocked, so Yahoo became blocked for the period of time that ad was displayed. We had this happen multiple times and eventually switched to a different solution at that location.
I've had issues with their cloud portal not working. I don't have to edit our configuration often, but on numerous occasions, i was unable to get the configuration page to load after login, sometimes for days. The platform just wasn't stable when I needed it to be.
We run many of our remote rooms as frozen (after logoff they reset to the image). This works fine most times, but when content protect needs a configuration change pushed down, someone needs to go 'thaw' the computers, download the updated configuration, and re-'freeze' the computer. It would be nice if that information was just dynamic from the cloud and didn't need to be pulled down.
The categorization used for policies is very limited and not flexible or easily customizable.
I don't like giving a 10 since everyone always has room for improvement, and while Securly is doing an awesome job, there is still room for improvement across the board.
ContentProtect helps increase productivity by blocking inappropriate or time wasting web content. With the powerful cloud-based administration tools you can make changes and see reports anywhere and anytime. Best part is it is available on all platforms and hence the product is also scalable. Loved it over any product in the current market
Securly Filter integration with Google Workspace for education makes it an ideal pairing for K-12 institutions. It has a friendlier portal and more intuitive UI, particularly when retrieving activity logs. The policy customization is also far easier and responsive. That being said, it does not provide a full-fledged firewall like Untangle NG (nor many of the other useful features from NG, such as simple-to-deploy VPN).
It was a relatively inexpensive and simple solution when we needed one relatively quickly, which is a positive. The inexpensive price has kept it in the environment.
The lack of reliable reporting has lead to the need for an alternate monitoring solution in a few cases. Network level reporting was used, which is a separate expense, configuration.
Time has been lost waiting on the portal and then troubleshooting support tickets when sites that shouldn't have been blocked have been blocked. It has resulted in changes for locations that needed dynamic category filtering as opposed to a finite list.
The blocking of sites based on add traffic or sub-sites (rather than just blocking that content like other solutions) has resulted in downtime during classes when those sites were listed in the lesson plan and had previously worked.