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Cymphonix Enables
Creative Education at Ohio Schools
Salt Lake City, Feb. 2, 2009 - Cymphonix® today announced
that Garfield Heights City School District, which oversees five Ohio
elementary, middle and high schools, has installed the award-winning Cymphonix Network Composer® appliance
to manage network traffic and allow educational access to bandwidth-intensive
sites.
As teachers began to request access to sites
like YouTube to develop diverse,
interactive and creative lesson plans, the district realized its current
technology limited them to an "all or nothing" approach for both staff and
students. It became a priority for the district to find a content filter that
allowed it to assign varying network and Internet access levels based on
different operating permissions for teachers and student-level users.
Additionally, Garfield Heights' previous content filtering
solution did not provide sufficient visibility into online activities via the
network. The district's Internet connections would regularly slow to a crawl
and, once administrators confirmed the problem was not with their Internet
provider, they were unsure which sites or users were causing the lagging
speeds.
"We knew that students were bypassing our
filter and accessing blocked sites like MySpace
through the use of anonymous proxies, but unfortunately we couldn't prove who
was doing it or which sites they were accessing," said Shari Bailey, director
of technology for the Garfield Heights City School District.
"Tracking down individual user violations
proved to be a time - and labor - intensive task. The district was in need of a
solution that could become the eyes of our network - we simply didn't have time
to manually monitor all user activity and maintain blacklists on a daily basis."
Upon determining the existing solution was
not meeting its needs, Garfield Heights City School District acted quickly,
integrating the Cymphonix Network
Composer into the network and monitoring traffic to establish standard use
policies. Once the device was in place, the Network Composer DC40X also allowed
the district to regulate and differentiate which websites could be accessed by
each group of users.
"Now when our network slows down, I can
quickly pull up the general dashboard to determine what has been downloaded or
uploaded and discipline users if necessary," commented Bailey. "Cymphonix's
real-time URL monitor has also proven to be useful by showing which sites are
being visited at any given moment and which users are accessing it. As an
example, I can tell that one particular student has logged 210 visits to
YouTube and I know exactly which computer he was using, what time he was
logging on, etc. I never would have had information like this with my previous
solution!"
Cymphonix's real-time monitoring capability
allows administrators to immediately see which sites individual users are
accessing at any moment, and then course-correct with policy updates or
disciplinary investigation - ultimately speeding up the district's network while
adding flexibility and enforcement capability to online activity policies -
saving time, money and enabling the necessary staff Internet access to creative
teaching approaches.
Cymphonix also announced today advanced anonymous proxy
filtering capabilities for the industry-leading Network Composer appliance.
Further details on this announcement can be viewed at: http://www.cymphonix.com/EduProxies.
For more information on how Cymphonix has heightened
network monitoring capabilities and enabled interactive lesson planning for
organizations like the Garfield Heights City School District, view case studies
at http://www.cymphonix.com/Solutions.html.
About Cymphonix
Cymphonix Corporation, headquartered in
Salt Lake City, uses award-winning patent-pending technology to reveal,
optimize and automate Internet security.
With deep-packet scanning technology, Cymphonix solutions address the
issues created by evolving content - including web applications and
bandwidth-intensive websites. Cymphonix
products seamlessly integrate network protection, application performance, and
traffic visibility into a single, easily managed solution. Leading the
Cymphonix product line is Network Composer, a smart gateway appliance that
helps organizations understand at a glance who is abusing network resources and
with what applications - enabling problems to be corrected instantly through a
clear, easy-to-manage interface. More information about Cymphonix can be found
at www.cymphonix.com.
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