Texas' Lewisville Independent School District (ISD) has selected Web and mobile security vendor ContentKeeperto secure and monitor 53,000 iPads.
Lewisville ISD needed to ensure policy compliance for both the allocated 1:1 iPads and enable BYOD for any devices brought onto the school’s network as part of the district’s 1:X™ initiative.
The vision of the district’s pilot 1:X initiative is to provide for the right device at the right time. Manager of Network and Technical Services, Patrick Johnson was charged with ensuring 1:X remained CIPA compliant and students remained accountable for their Web use.
“1:X was totally new for us. There was no roadmap for this. Introducing iPads, which are essentially consumer devices, into an enterprise network and getting everything to work is challenging. ContentKeeper was device agnostic and helped make a logistically challenging task easier by enabling us to ensure devices are managed centrally, without having to touch the devices themselves,” said Johnson.
Lewisville ISD already had a CIPA compliant Web filtering technology solution in place. But, the existing filter did not meet the district’s needs for ensuring Web protection for students and staff on their mobile devices as well desktops. The Lewisville IT team also identified SSL inspection and granular social media and Web 2.0 application controls as critical requirements that they needed a new Web filtering solution to provide.
“We liked the way ContentKeeper handled SSL filtering and Web 2.0 applications. This was critical for us - it’s what the kids do. We identified a number of social media applications we needed to be able to granually control. ContentKeeper enables us to set granular policies over social networking sites and applications. When we identified one or two media types that didn’t appear to be available in the product, ContentKeeper added support for them overnight. It’s a level of support and responsiveness that we hadn’t seen from a vendor before,” explained Mr. Johnson
According to Mr. Johnson, ContentKeeper Technologies’ support and ability to deliver was the deciding factor in being selected.
“ContentKeeper provided amazing support. They even helped us develop a custom solution to centrally manage devices and help ensure students only used approved software profiles. When we had questions about how we could prevent students from wiping the fixed settings on their iPads, ContentKeeper delivered the answers,” Mr Johnson concluded.
