case study: webb city r-vii school district

tech brief – summer2014 – v1.0

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Case Study: Webb City R-VII School District

Information on District Webb City R-VII is an 11 school K-12 district of 4000 students and staff. Tim White (Director of Technology) heads up their IT team.

Information on Environment The district has a "mixed" environment that is typical of many districts around the country. Starting in the 2013-2014 school year, 1200 Chromebooks were sent home with high school students. iPads are the device of choice in most K-8 classrooms. Staff are primarily Macbook users. The district also has some Windows PCs that are managed by Active Directory. Webb City was one of many districts in the state of Missouri to have "Gone Google" with Google Apps for Education being used intensively to facilitate classroom instruction.

The district had to undergo a significant technology upgrade in 2013 to gear up for their 1:1 program. Bandwidth was upgraded from 100Mbps to 250Mbps. Among other things, the district's ageing web-filter would need to be replaced.

Tim was extremely hands on with his testing and tried a number of web-filters in a live environment. Among them were iBoss, Lightspeed, Meraki, Barracuda, M8e6, SonicWall and Sophos. Towards the end of testing, iBoss was a clear front-runner.

Pain-points However, the iBoss appliance suffered from a number of significant pain-points:

- The appliance could not keep up with the bandwidth requirements of the district. Classrooms full of students watching YouTube videos simultaneously suffered from a degraded user-experience. On a 100Mbps link, Tim could get no more than 60Mbps of throughput on a certified appliance. No single node on the network could break 20Mbps.

- Webb City community standards asked for at-home filtering. For this to work with the iBoss appliance, traffic had to be routed from the students' homes to the on-premise appliance and back out to the Internet. This has two distinct disadvantages (i) Tim had to be responsible for 24/7 network uptime (ii) Students at-home browsing was limited by the district's bandwidth uplink (which was 1/2 that of the downlink).

- The Google Apps for Education suite was at the heart of the value that Chromebooks brought to the district. iBoss's inability to "play nice" with GAfE was a sticking point for Tim.

- The district had incidents of students misusing GMail privileges and the need to properly police student e-mail access was high on the list of Tim's priorities. Unfortunately, iBoss's inability to decrypt SSL traffic made this a non-starter. Appliances that did have this ability (McAfee and Bluecoat) were out of reach from a budgetary stand-point.

The Securly Solution The Securly team worked with Tim to craft solutions that fit the unique needs of his district.

- When Tim took iBoss out and put Securly in its place, many users on his network noticed an immediate improvement in bandwidth utilization. The fact that Securly is cloud based means that >99% of the network's traffic passes through unimpeded.

- Traffic from the students' take-home Chromebooks went straight out to the Internet. Not having to be responsible for 24/7 network uptime was a significant savings on Tim's resources which were already stretched thin.

- Securly's man-in-the-middle SSL decryption solution helped Tim block students from logging into their consumer GMail accounts on Chromebooks while limiting access to Google Apps accounts. School GMail accounts were audited through archiving on Google Apps.

- Securly's Google Apps integration provided Tim with seamless SSO on his Chromebooks. Google Apps also acted as the "glue" that bound his heterogenous environment as an in-the-cloud identity provider.

Unified Filtering and Detailed Reporting One other solution that Tim evaluated closely was the Guardian Chrome extension, which had the following limitations as compared to Securly:

- Specific to Chromebooks: Given the fact that Webb City had a heterogeneous environment, the district needed to filter a lot more than just Chromebooks.

- Lack of Data Retention: Guardian is limited to a couple of thousand flagged activity entries. There is no ability to access any given user’s non-flagged activity. Securly on the other hand reports on every site visited by every user going back six months.

Results at a Glance - Bandwidth efficiency - Unified Filtering - Lower total cost of ownership - Improved at home browsing experience

- Seamless SSO on Chromebooks - Consumer GMail blocking