Web Filtering Solutions - Commercial Filtering vs. Blacklist

[reicherb]

I'm at a school district with 725 PCs and 2200 students. Our current SurfControl contract is expiring and they want $8,000 a year to renew the subscription. The cost is comparable for other commercial solutions. That seems absolutely outrageous to me, but we also absolutely have to have some form of filtering in place.

I've done some reading about public administered blacklists and wondered if anyone had experiences with them? I'm specifically looking at LinkWall because of it's easy integration with BorderManager but would consider anything for the right price and performance. Has anybody had any good and/or bad experiences with blacklists/whitelists?

Thanks.

 

[Garion]

Keep in mind that public blacklists are free. You get what you pay for. For example, the SquidGuard Blacklist has 100,000 entries. The SurfControl database has about 5 million. Go beyond that, Websense has 4 million sites, comprised of about a billion URL's. It's VERY expensive, but pretty good. $8K is cheap, actually.

Commercial products have large banks of automated systems and websurfers that do nothing but spend their day surfing the web and categorizing and URL's. You're going to get a lot more hits and a lot more accurate results. Sites just change too fast for a public blacklist to be able to keep up with them -

With content filtering, you get what you pay for. Given what you do, you need effective filtering. You don't want some parent coming to complain because little Jimmy ended up at a porn site three clicks away from www.barney.com.

$8K seems a bit pricey, however for 275 machines. Make sure they are selling you a price per machine, not a price per user. Also, get some quotes from competitors. N2H2 is big in the education market and might have some better pricing for you, plus they also integrate with BorderMangler. Even if you don't go with them, you can always use them to try to drive your SurfControl pricing down a bit.

SmartFilter, from Secure Computing is also pretty good, but they don't have a BorderManager integration, so it's probably out for you.

- G

 

[reicherb]

8k might seem cheap, but I've only got 110k to use for maintenance and replace of:
PCs, printers, servers, infrastructure, software, phone system, training, maintenance contracts, long distance service, internet access, a close circuit TV system, multiple t1 circuits, and the list goes on.

I honestly can't even begin to maintain what I've got for $110k but money is tight and technology is one of the first to go. A month ago, as a district we decided on a 5yr replacement schedule for most equipment. When I told them that $250k wouldn't be enough, they said tough.

I had forgotten about N2H2. I'll have to check them out. I assume they still run on a separate *nix box?

Thanks.