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Incommunities Delivers Safe Internet Access with Bloxx Web Filtering

Background

Established in February 2003, Incommunities (previously Bradford Community Housing Trust Group) was formed with the goal to provide affordable, high quality homes, principally for rent in neighbourhoods across the Bradford District. The not-for-profit organisation is responsible for the day-to-day operational management of around 21,300 properties and 1,000 leasehold properties, delivering housing management services, estate, repairs and maintenance services. Incommunities employs around 1,000 staff at a number of locations in the district including six neighbourhood offices, a city centre head office and local depots.

All employees of Incommunities put the customer 1st and work together for their benefit. The organisation listens to and respects the views of all individuals and communities in order to understand and respond to their needs. They are open, honest, transparent, caring and responsible in all their business dealing.

Incommunities’s vision is to provide homes of 1st choice, be an employer of 1st choice and be partner of 1st choice.

The Challenge

With the dynamic nature of the Internet, Incommunities uses the Internet as a vital business tool that helps them to meet their priorities in the community and with their tenants. Andrew Bland, Senior Network Administrator at Incommunities realised that their previous Web filtering supplied as a managed service, just wasn’t delivering the much needed performance, protection and reporting that the organisation required in order to deliver on its goals.

Bland explains, “The solution was performing very poorly overall and we felt our network was at risk with such an inadequately managed Internet security system. We decided to look for a solution that could protect us from spyware, provide adequate reporting on Internet usage on an individual per user basis so that we could provide reporting to senior management on Internet use, and reduce IT administration time.”

The Solution

Incommunities wanted a new hardware-based solution, primarily so the organisation could allow an unlimited number of employees to access the Internet without paying costly ‘per user’ licenses or having to purchase additional user licenses. After careful review of Web filtering functionality, Incommunities decided that Bloxx Web filtering had all the features it was looking for and purchased a CF-2000 high availability version for redundancy. Subsequently, the organisation upgraded its Bloxx Web filtering to include the revolutionary Tru-View Technology.

“We decided to go with an appliance-based Web filtering solution as we wanted to have control over our Web filtering solution but didn’t want to spend lots of valuable IT management time updating and upgrading the solution,” comments Bland.

“Not only does Bloxx provide the functionality and flexibility we are looking for in a Web filtering solution, their no-cost-per-user pricing, ease of administration and management, and simple but indepth reporting functionality outrivals our previous solution.”

The Results

Incommunities has been using Bloxx Web filtering to deliver safe Internet surfing for its workforce for the past six years.

“We can now allow Web access based on different access policies for groups and departments across the organisation. This is made easy through active directory integration which means we only have to maintain one set of user groups and any updates are imported automatically to the Bloxx Web filtering appliance,” adds Bland.

The Bloxx appliance enables Incommunities to run a transparent proxy as it has different platforms and did not want any client side configuration. A transparent proxy also prohibits internal abuse as it would be effectively invisible within the network. This frees up Internet bandwidth by controlling the amount of web pages that are viewed.

“We have found our Bloxx appliance to be highly reliable and are delighted with the effective pro-active Web filtering we provide. The simple architecture and easy to use interface has meant that administration of our Internet security is extremely easy. This frees me up to work on other IT projects,” comments Bland.

Bloxx provides an integrated reporting tool that delivers over 120 different types of reports on Internet activity. Bland explains, “I schedule daily, automated reports that provide me with invaluable information on our Internet activity. This information allows me to easily understand and manage our staffs Internet access and provide reports to senior management on Internet use throughout the organisation.”

“Protection against web-borned threats to our network was an important element of our Web filtering requirements. We are impressed by Bloxx’s effective anti-spyware, anti-phishing and anti-virus tool and feel confident that our network is secure and our users and organisation fully protected,” adds Bland.

“When we looked to replace our managed service we found that other filtering solutions worked out to be far too expensive as they had a cost-per-user pricing model. With Bloxx, we have a terrific solution that is simple to use and has great, advanced features. And we get all this protection at a lower price than we paid previously,” said Bland.