Gila Crossing Community School was using a WebSense appliance for content filtering but faced issues with maintenance, outages causing the filter to become unstable, and an inability to delegate control to teachers and staff. They implemented Securly's cloud-based content filtering which eliminated the need to maintain on-premise hardware, ensured filtering continued during outages, and allowed teachers to whitelist sites and access YouTube for Education. The new solution required less IT maintenance and provided improved web filtering controls.

1. case study: gila crossing
community school
tech brief – summer2014 – v1.0
securly://

2. Case Study: Gila Crossing Community School
Information on School
Located south of Lavine, AZ on the Gila River Indian Reservation. The school has 600
students and 100 full time staff. Fernando Marquez (Director of Technology) heads up
their IT team.
Information on Environment
The school has 100 Chromebooks that are growing year over year. There are two labs
each with 15 PCs running Windows 7. Each class has 2-3 desktop PCs. There are also
15 iPads and 20 Kindle Fires that are used by the lower grades.
The school was using a WebSense appliance to achieve CIPA compliance.
Pain-points
The WebSense appliance suffered from a number of drawbacks:
- YouTube for Education was not an option and YouTube became an all or
nothing option.
- Whitelists had to be managed by IT. If teachers ran info a piece of educational
content that was blocked in class, they would need to file a IT helpdesk ticket in
order to be able to get it unblocked.
- Power outages are common in the area. A brief power outage in the middle of
the night would cause the appliance to reboot and enter an unstable state (web-
filter no longer active). Days or weeks would go by before IT staff realized this to
be the case.
- The IT team would have ideally liked to provide control over web-filtering policy
to a larger team (tech helpers, etc). This could not be achieved because the
appliance was in a room to which access had to be restricted due to practical
considerations.
The Securly Solution
Securly’s cloud based operations meant that Fernando’s team no longer had to be
responsible for maintaining an on-premise appliance. Outages were no longer an issue.
Control of web-filtering policy could be handed to a larger group that could log into
Securly’s cloud based dashboard. Teachers could instantly whitelist sites that they
were blocked on. Finally students now had access to YouTube in a controlled
environment.

3. Results at a Glance
- Low maintenance in-the-cloud solution.
- Delegating responsibility of web-filtering policy to tech admins and teachers.
- YouTube for Education.