Dear all, we are about to make some changes to the web filtering service. As you know this currently goes through webroot. We intend to change the service from 'webroot' to 'websense'.
We used to use websense up until about four years ago (it was called Blackspider before that) when we switched to webroot.
We wish to change web filtering providers for a number of reasons. Webroot have decided to put their prices up by a very big margin (nearly 50%). Webroot also has constraints on some features of the service that are causing business issues.
In addition to keeping costs low moving to websense will give us a number of business benefits:
We will enable transparent authentication for users on the lucite.net domain. This will mean that people will not have to log in to use the internet, their windows login will be passed through to manage their access. We will still be able to track and report on users use of the internet when required. The users at those APAC sites are using AD integrated authentication to transparently authenticate. So for example this will be possible in Taiwan where the users are all on AD. For sites where the users are not on the lucite.net then they will have to manually authenticate as before.
Allow us more flexibility in managing social media (we will be able to in future give people access to read but not post to facebook for example).
We are planning to test a feature of websense that uses a local agent to manage proxy settings. If this is successful then it will mean we can remove the ISA servers. This will be a big benefit as this software is obsolete and we have not been able to find a good replacement.
If the agent works as expected we could potentially use it to allow people working at home or hotels to access the internet directly instead of having to start VPN. This would increase their speed significantly.
A lot of testing has already been done and all users at Cassel and Cordova sites have been using the new service for over a week without any major issues.
We would like to start testing this mechanism with yourselves now to ensure a smooth migration later in the month.
Please do participate in the testing as we need to have moved to websense by the end of august as our service with webroot expires at the end of the month.
Craig Williams is managing this project and will send you instructions on how to use the test proxy services. These are based in Darwen and Cordova so do not expect them to be fast. For now we wish to test you can access them and authenticate to them.
If there are key business users who you would want to check can get to particular websites before we cut over then please let us know and we can set them up to test.