Elementary and high school districts existed in Sanger as early as 1889, and Sanger Union High School's first building was dedicated in 1901. The district unified in the late 1960's. Sanger Unified has 19 schools, including three charter schools, a community day school, and an adult school. The district covers 180 square miles and serves a population of 31,000. Attendance in the District's schools currently numbers 10,150 students.
Sanger Unified has Evolved with eSoft
For the past five years, Sanger Unified has been using eSoft InstaGate products for some interesting applications involving access to the Internet via the district's T1 connections. “We're a rural district and some of our schools are 10 to 12 miles outside of town so we had to give access to some of those distant schools via wireless access using a nearby T1 and the InstaGates would allow us to set up routing for a wireless LAN as well as provide us with security and access to the cloud,” said Del Beshore, Technology Specialist, with Sanger Unified School District. “We've really evolved with eSoft.”
Today, Sanger Unified is using four of eSoft's ThreatWall Content Security Gateways with the company's Web ThreatPak capabilities to protect its infrastructure. The ThreatWall appliance has been purpose-built to withstand the rigors of application-level security, making deployment of critical security functions such as anti-virus, anti-phishing, intrusion prevention, and web content filtering almost effortless while retaining maximum effectiveness. eSoft's SoftPak Director subscription management provides the district with unmatched flexibility and responsiveness with the ability to add new security applications, as well as instantly and automatically receive ongoing updates and malware signatures.
Controlling Internet Usage
The ThreatWall appliances perform content filtering for Sanger Unified schools and all four are located in the network operations center. Outbound Internet traffic traverses one of the ThreatWall appliances based on grade: the first ThreatWall filters K-5 traffic; one filters grades 6-8 traffic; one appliance is dedicated to high school traffic; and the fourth appliance is a user authentication gateway for those individuals who need no proxy, or extensive access to the Internet.
“The fourth box is user-authenticated and gives wide access to those who have the right password, for those teachers and staff members who have a need to access pages like MySpace or other pages like that for administrative or research purposes,” said Beshore.
eSoft's SiteFilter technology provides Beshore with the control he needs to enforce what sites students can and cannot access. Beshore likes that eSoft automatically blocks so many sites by category, including drugs, sex, violence and so on, and likes that he can go in and manually add sites as necessary.
Simplified Management across Product Lines
eSoft's products, all of which have been designed for ease of use and time-saving features and functionality, significantly lessen the burden for Beshore, who shoulders many responsibilities. The ThreatWall gateways are easy to configure and change, and by integrating all of the district's network security tools into a single management console, he can manage the entire security solution and keep a handle on all activity, both inside and outside the network.
“Everything I've worked with from eSoft is very simple to use,” said Beshore. “The InstaGate gateways were easy to learn, and now the ThreatWall appliances. The GUI is really simplistic, it's so easy to go in and figure out on the fly.”
eSoft Offers More than Appliances
Beshore likes more than the Internet security products offered by eSoft. “The support we've received from eSoft has been terrific,” said Beshore. “In addition to products that just do what they say they're going to do, the customer support keeps us coming back. We'll remain happy eSoft customers for a long while, I predict.”
