Bloxx Web Filtering protects the College’s 16,000 users whilst online

Bloxx, the innovator in Web filtering, today announced that Milton Keynes College is using Bloxx’s third generation Web filtering to ensure the online safety of its 16,000 users. Powered by its patented Tru-View Technology, Bloxx provides Milton Keynes College with real-time Website analysis and categorization that delivers staff and students with higher levels of online protection and increases productivity, as well as minimising network security risks and IT management time.

The college has been using Bloxx for the past two years after replacing its previous solution from SurfControl. As Bloxx identifies and categorises websites at the point of user request, anonymous proxy sites, which were highly prolific at the college, are now caught and shut down immediately. “The Bloxx Web Filter has been fantastic at blocking anonymous proxy sites instantly without any work from my team, leading to increased safety and security for the students and network. We operate a zero tolerance policy towards anonymous proxies and Bloxx gives us all the evidence we need to remove Internet access from people who consistently try to use anonymisers to access the Internet,” explains Ashley Allen, Systems DBA at Milton Keynes College.

The college has introduced several Internet access policies for staff and students, with a dozen different policies activate at any one time.  This granularity by course, location, and subject area, allows the filtering to be relevant to users’ specific needs thereby minimizing support requests to block/allow sites.

Ashley adds, “The reporting functionality on the Bloxx Web Filter is extremely useful. We get a report sent through every two hours listing all blocked access per user and if we identify large amounts of blocked activity, we run a more detailed report. Our students and staff are now undeniably aware that if they try to access blocked sites, we will catch them. Publishing browsing time reports for Facebook and other social networking sites has had an impact on staff productivity as we tend to see a large drop off in the number of visits when the report is released.”

Implementing Bloxx Web Filter has demonstrated significant time savings over the past two years of the college’s IT team.  Allen explains, “The process for identifying and blocking users has now become much more straightforward, freeing up 3rd line IT time and providing significant cost savings. Our previous Web filter was a lot more labour intensive – we would never go back.”