Opendium Web Gateway

Traditional web filtering systems simply used large databases of web addresses to identify web sites. The modern dynamic web delivers content that is tailored to the individual users and it is no longer appropriate to rely solely on web address databases. A web page may be categorised as Social Networking all of the time, but content analysis can identify that sometimes it should also be Radicalisation or Self Harm.

Bring Your Own Device networks can be provided with full filtering and monitoring capabilities. Since Web Gateway does not require any apps to be installed on the device, almost any type of device can be supported, including ChromeOS, iOS, Android, Windows, OS X and Linux.

Opendium was built on the reputation of always offering exceptional support. We recognise that each school is unique and offer several levels of support to meet your needs. You can always speak directly with an experienced engineer in our UK offices, who will endeavour to get to the root of the problem as quickly as possible.

With Trusted Man In The Middle decryption, full filtering and monitoring capabilities, including real-time content inspection, are available even for secure encrypted web sites.

The latest safeguarding regulations make it clear that schools must monitor the students' internet activity in order to identify those who are at risk. A variety of reports are provided so that you can meet these requirements and Web Gateway can automatically email the latest reports to appropriate staff on a regular basis.

Users, networks and individual devices are organised into a hierarchical tree. You can set global web filtering policies for the whole school and then refine them for more specific groups of users, devices or locations. Policies can be set right down to the individual user or device level if required. The unique Time Periods system allows filtering policies to be easily tuned based on the time of day and day of the week.

Web searches made through search engines such as Google, YouTube and a wide variety of other websites are categorised and presented as either a list of search queries or a word cloud with concerning phrases highlighted. This provides an at-a-glance report which can be drilled down into to investigate any concerns.

If you are suspicious of a certain user's activities, you can get a good overview with the Images and Web Searches reports. The Images report will show a selection of images that the user has been viewing. The Images report can also be set to target certain categories, which provides a useful overview of concerning images across your entire network. For example, a weekly report of images that the system believes may be pornographic is a good source of information for safeguarding purposes.

Applications frequently do not provide useful error messages, so web traffic logs are invaluable for administrators who need to diagnose and resolve a problem. The forensic detail of the logs recorded by Web Gateway are also invaluable in the event that a serious incident occurs on the school network. Our highly experienced support team are always on hand to help interpret the technical detail.

Opendium is an education focussed company that has worked closely with schools since 2005 to develop solutions such as Web Gateway and UTM exclusively for the education sector. Unlike other solutions that were developed as business products and have been shoehorned into schools, Web Gateway has been designed with educators in mind from the start.

In recent years, the British government has regularly updated and strengthened the guidance that schools are expected to follow to safeguard the children who are in their care. The schools that have relied on Opendium solutions found that they stood in good stead in the face of the new guidance, as it largely codified the good practice that we were already promoting.

Web Gateway is compliant with the Department for Education's Keeping Children Safe in Education statutory guidance, the Home Office's Prevent Duty and is certified as meeting the requirements of the UK Safer Internet Centre's Appropriate Filtering for Education Settings.

We also work closely with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and the Counter Terrorist Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) to support their work and protect our customers, and the people under their care, from illegal child abuse images and unlawful terrorist content.

A traditional firewall controls non-web traffic by allowing or blocking all traffic on specific ports. Some applications such as Skype require thousands of ports to be allowed, which can be used by other software such as games and VPNs. Web Gateway uses deep packet inspection to positively identify the application that is being controlled without allowing free-for-all access for other apps.

Issuing tablets to students on a one-to-one basis is an expensive proposition and many schools choose the cheaper option of temporarily issuing devices to students who return them after a few hours. Without knowing which student has which device, it is impossible for schools to provide age appropriate filtering or to produce safeguarding reports which identify individual. Web Gateway provides a unique solution to this allowing the user to be identified though a captive portal and then automatically logged off once the tablet disconnects from the network.

A school cannot fulfil its safeguarding obligations if users are using VPNs and anonymous proxies to bypass the filtering and monitoring. Web Gateway includes advanced anti-spoofing technology to block even the most troublesome VPN apps, such as HotSpot Shield.