Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center – Smoothwall Filter Case Study
Find out how Smoothwall helped the IT Director for this 6-campus alternative high school find a web filtering solution to keep the 830+ students safe across a mix of desktops, laptops, and BYOD units.
What’s the background?
The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center is an alternative high school that caters to students who want to pursue their passions with a focus on real-world learning through internships.
The Met, as it’s called, is its own school district; it’s made up of 6 small schools with a combined total of approximately 830 students. They currently have a mix of desktops, laptops, and BYOD units, but use Chromebooks as the primary method of computing which brings web filtering to the forefront of importance. The tech department is headed by John Anter, IT Director.
Stability was the number one issue, with up-time being critical to their deployment. “For me, it’s about the stability of a product and the up-time,” says John.
What was the challenge?
Before Smoothwall, the Met was having issues with a product that was overly complicated for limited filtering functionality. “Web filtering policies were very unintuitive and time-consuming,” says John.
I’ve used a lot of firewalls over the years, it’s definitely the best one.