The Royal College of Obstetricians and
Gynaecologists (RCOG) has deployed an appliance-based system to
overcome its web-filtering challenges.
The college is unable to use most standard
web filtering systems because they block too much of the
content the colleague typically deals with relating to sexual
health.
RCOG's students are mainly medical practitioners who are
specialising in obstetrics and gynaecology.
Felipe Varela, acting IT support manager at RCOG, said the
college needed a system that enabled it to be highly specific about
what content each user group can access.
"The R3000 web-filtering system from 8e6 Technolgies allows us
to block or allow specific content and websites to groups and
individual users on an ad hoc basis according to their field of
study and changing needs," he said.
The college also needed a system that would store the
web-monitoring reports required by its strict web-browsing policy
without using vital server space.
"The software-based system we were using filled up all our
server space, but the appliance-based system solves this problem by
having its own storage," said Varela.
The Linux-based appliance has built in storage and uses data
compression to enable it to keep web-monitoring reports for several
years compared with only a few months.
Varela said the college chose the R3000 system because it was
easy to administer internally and met its filtering and storage
requirements within the RCOG's budget.
It was also not network-intensive, unlike competing
appliance-based systems, and does not use any internet bandwidth as
externally hosted systems would do, he said.