The Massac Unit #1 School District needed a single, cost-effective web filter to serve its 8 buildings and 2,200 students and staff who used a mix of Windows, Chromebooks, and BYOD devices across multiple ISPs. The existing CIPA filter appliance caused bottlenecks and frequent crashes. Securly provided cloud-based filtering that integrated with the district's Google Apps for Education, addressing bandwidth and management issues at a fraction of the cost compared to an on-premise solution. The new solution resulted in improved bandwidth efficiency, lower costs, and avoided complex active directory single sign-on challenges due to Securly's Google Apps integration.

1. case study: massac unit #1 school
district
tech brief – summer2014 – v1.0
securly://

2. Case Study: Massac Unit #1 School District
Information on District
Located in Metropolis, IL, this is a rural school district with eight buildings and 2200
students and staff. Tom Walker (Director of Technology) heads up their IT team.
Information on Environment
The environment has Windows making up over half the hosts. The rest are Chrome-
boxes and Chromebooks. Ageing Windows devices are being replaced by Chrome
devices as they are being phased out. The district also has a number of BYOD devices.
The district was using CIPA filter for the primary location and OpenDNS for the
elementary schools in the district.
Pain-points
Tom was looking for a single web-filter that served the needs of his entire district. He
also needed the solution to be reasonably priced. OpenDNS provided Tom with the
advantages of cloud-based filtering. However, it not provide him with the kind of
auditing he needed for his district. Also, OpenDNS had turned away from K-12 which
made Tom less inclined to pursue them as an option.
The CIPA filter also suffered from a number of drawbacks:
- As the BYOD traffic in the district increased, the appliance became a frequent
bottleneck in the network. Memory leaks caused it to “freeze” frequently and
manual reboots were the order of the day. A newer appliance that could handle
the district’s exploding bandwidth needs cost 4X-5X what they ended up paying
for Securly.
- Being in a rural location meant that the district’s buildings were geographically
dispersed. As a result they were served by multiple ISPs (no single provider
would serve the entire district). The lack of a single Intranet made centralizing
the district’s AD infrastructure hard to do. As a result, Tom’s team was unable to
utilize CIPA Filter’s AD integration and had to rely on internal IPs for reporting.
The Securly Solution
The district was a prolific user of Google Apps for Education. Securly’s ability to
integrate with GAfE made it unnecessary for Tom and his team to consider a more
complicated AD-based solution. Simply put, Securly was a solution that in Tom’s words
“ran itself” and helped Tom keep his district complaint from a filtering perspective at a
fraction of the cost as compared to an appliance based solution. Finally, Securly

3. managed to address Tom’s bandwidth efficiency headaches in one shot. The
lightweight cloud-based approach meant that >99% of the traffic would pass through
the district’s network unimpeded by an appliance.
Results at a Glance
- Bandwidth efficiency.
- Lower total cost of ownership.
- Google Apps for Edu SSO helped district avoid “impossible” looking AD SSO.