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Pinacl Solutions partner with SmoothWall for the City of York
York is often referred to as the capital of the North. The city combines its international reputation as one of the worlds most historic and picturesque places to visit, with a modern edge reflected in its shops, restaurants, theatres and nightlife.
City of York Council has recently agreed a ten year contract with SmoothWall preferred Partner Pinacl Solutions to provide a managed service environment for networking across the city wide Council’s estate which includes 67 schools, 14 libraries, accommodation and council offices as well as sports facilities. Work has already begun building a dark fibre network around the city which will provide super fast connectivity – up to 10Gbps.
The new network (expected to be in place by September 2010) will exceed BECTA guidelines for school connectivity and will support around 24,000 pupils in the locality.
The Requirement
The City of York Council education estate comprises of approximately 6000 PCs across 90 sites including secondary schools, primary schools, libraries and youth centres.
Mark Newbould, (Professional Services Manager at Pinacl) was looking for a replacement for the existing filtering solution, which was perceived to be outdated and no longer fit for purpose as it only provided URL based filtering. He knew City of York Council needed a combination of Content Based Filtering and URL Filtering to improve pupil safety.
The Solution
Smoothwall was perceived to be the market leader, and had a suite of products which could be tailored to individual requirements and situations. Key features within Guardian included content based filtering, improved reliability, ease of administration, patching and upgrades.
Mark explains,“Many of the other filtering solutions we investigated provided only URL based filtering, which is not as secure and requires additional administration to maintain a reasonable level of security. Guardian provides full content based
filtering, which was a preferred element by City of York Council”
With Guardian, Mark could implement a flexible configuration, with individual installations serving the secondary schools (to provide local-level control) and a centrally managed solution (with load balancing) for the remaining sites - this has allowed Pinacl to differentiate between filtering profiles.
In addition, a centralised Smoothwall solution has been implemented within the council to enable safe public access to the internet in sites such as libraries and key office sites.
The Results
Since installation in December 2009, Laura Conkar (ICT Client Manager – City of York Council) says Guardian has been well received by the users as a reliable and easy to use solution, reducing administration and most importantly, saving staff time.
The Guardian has enabled primary school staff have more availability for teaching, as configuration changes are made through change requests to a central helpdesk. IT staff are also pleased with the additional value of the anti-spam filter, which had not previously been provided as a service to schools.
When asked if he had any comments about the standard of service and support received from SmoothWall Mark said:“During the installation period we found SmoothWall’s Technical Support centre to be very responsive, and were extremely impressed with the response we received. Key contacts within SmoothWall have provided dditional support and advice to the ICT technical team to manage
specific incidents.”