November 2011

Grace Christian School is providing its students and staff with a safe and secure IT environment with a SecurED solution from Netbox Blue. The solution features highly advanced Category Web Filtering and Zero Day Anonymous Proxy Prevention to ensure complete internet compliance. The solution delivers total protection against today’s challenges as well as unique social networking safeguards that will continue to protect the school into the future. 

 
“It’s an excellent product,” IT Manager, Garry Hewett says. “It has solved our IT issues and has a much more user-friendly interface than other products we looked at.”

The school needed to replace several outdated devices. It decided to consolidate its solutions to provide complete security against the current threats as well as the challenges that the school might face in the future with laptops, MacBooks and social media. The school was also looking for a solution that would be cost effective and easy to use and manage.

Grace Christian School decided to trial Netbox Blue’s SecurED solution because it was an all-in-one solution with advanced features that promised to efficiently deal with anonymous proxies and encrypted websites and was able to filter access to social networking sites.

“It covered our needs and came with good product reviews and recommendations,” Mr Hewett says.

The SecurED solution delivers a complete suite of security and management features that include a firewall, email and URL filtering, reporting, as well as social network monitoring and controls. The solution has the added bonus of LAN segregation. Students and teachers are effectively on separate networks for external access bringing massive security and management advantages. It is also planned for staff members to have secure access to the school’s resources while outside the network with an easy-to-use VPN capability.

“The solution appears to be very stable with excellent reporting of the state of the interfaces,” Mr Hewett says. “We never knew our ADSL fluctuated so much before the Netbox!”
 
“The filtering products are quite sophisticated,” Mr Hewett says. “And the solution is relatively easy to learn and use.”

Grace Christian School now has a consolidated internet and email security and management solution that covers all of their current needs and is able to grow with the school as it moves towards a 1:1 student to laptop ratio. The SecurED solution provides total control over the network at school and will also eventually be rolled out on mobile devices. It can also deliver complete control over social networking with SafeChat® if the school decides to make use of this growing area of the internet.

 “The product does everything we expected of it,” Mr Hewett says. “The Netbox Blue staff are helpful and the solution is excellent.”

About Grace Christian School
Grace Christian School is located at Bunbury in Western Australia, and is a member of the Christian Schools Australia network. It provides a Christ-centred education to students from Kindergarten to Year 12. The school has a strong academic focus, while aiming to develop and nurture a Christian worldview. Grace has a progressive attitude towards IT deployment, but maintains strict policies on internet use and the security of students online is an absolute priority.

About Netbox Blue
Netbox Blue is a leading provider of innovative internet compliance, management and security solutions. Netbox Blue provides organisations with unique, real-time social media analysis and controls with predictive outcomes and benefits. The company owns granted patents around this unique technology and has other patents in the process of being granted. The company was established in 1999, is privately held and is based in Australia. It has a presence in over 19 countries and has partnerships and distribution agreements with some of the world's largest IT companies.

   
For more information please contact: Gita Raikar, Promotions Coordinator, Netbox Blue gita [dot] raikar [at] netboxblue [dot] com

Available for interview:
Garry Hewett, IT Manager, Grace Christian School ghewett [at] grace [dot] wa [dot] edu [dot] au
Pippa Burns, Regional Manager, Netbox Blue pippa [dot] burns [at] netboxblue [dot] com