SmoothWall launches modular firewall and web content filter for school and college networks

June 28, 2005 – SmoothWall Limited, the network security specialist, has launched School Guardian, an integrated Internet gateway firewall and web content filter designed specifically for educational establishments.

School Guardian addresses the three major challenges faced by school and college networks – blocking unsuitable web content, controlling access to Internet services and preventing attackers from compromising private systems and critical data.

“Schools have a social, moral and legal responsibility to protect their students from accessing objectionable content via the Internet,” said George Lungley, Managing Director of SmoothWall Limited. “With School Guardian, IT administrators can shield students from falling foul of inappropriate content on the Internet, ensuring they are not put at risk whilst using legitimate educational resources.”

School Guardian’s Dynamic Content Analysis filter scans web pages for words and phrases from numerous categories, including pornography, violence, drugs, racial hatred and gambling. Integration with Microsoft Active Directory® or other LDAP user authentication systems enables filtering policies to be applied based on the user’s membership of Windows user groups, without the need to store user credentials on the School Guardian system.

The firewall component of School Guardian defends the school system from attack, be that from the Internet at large or from other schools and users on the same shared network. Designed with ease of use in mind, it takes less than ten minutes to install the software that provides a complete firewall and web security solution.

Key features include:

* Integrated solution: Firewall and web content filter
* User Authentication: Integration with Microsoft Active Directory® and other LDAP user authentication systems
* Web security: Detection and blocking of spyware and web-delivered malicious code
* Internal network security: Separation of the student and administrative networks
* Safe searches: Google and other Internet search engines can be forced to operate in “safe search” mode, where they will not return search results or images that are unsuitable for a young audience
* Dynamic Content Analysis: Actual web page content is analysed to determine which pages to block, using categorised phrase lists that include pornography, violence, drugs, racial hatred and gambling
* Deep Packet Inspection: Block port-agile Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network traffic
* Local web cache: Improve web performance and reduce bandwidth utilisation

“School Guardian is not a ‘one size fits all’ solution,” added Lungley. “It is easily configured to the needs and preferences of individual schools, allowing multiple filtering policies to be created for different year groups, academic and administrative staff. School Guardian puts schools in control of their own network security and web content filtering policies.”

A School Guardian system can be extended to perform additional functions by the use of add-on modules. For example, schools that want to provide teachers with access to school systems from their homes can install the SmoothWall VPN Gateway module, which provides a low-cost Secure Remote Access solution for their staff from any Windows 2000 or XP computer.

Prices for School Guardian start at £450 for a 20 computer licence. To learn more, visit www.smoothwall.net for a list of approved partners, or contact SmoothWall pre-sales support at sales@smoothwall.net or phone +44 (0)870 1 999 500.

About SmoothWall Limited
Formed in 2000, SmoothWall is the leading Internet security provider now protecting over half a million networks worldwide. With its specialist development team, SmoothWall has harnessed years of technical expertise to develop a suite of firewall, virtual private network (VPN), content filtering and bandwidth solutions used by SMEs, large corporate organisations and educational institutions.

Based in the United Kingdom, with offices in Leeds and Southampton, SmoothWall delivers global security solutions through a worldwide support network, with representation in the USA, North and South America, Europe, Africa the Middle East and Australasia.

For more information and a Global directory of local sales and support partners, please visit: www.smoothwall.net.