London Grid for Learning, a leader in student safety in the UK, used Netsweeper to scale their filtering service to protect 2 million pupils
For schools, operational flexibility and ease of administration is the ultimate goal. IT managers and school administrators need a system that fits into their existing infrastructure and supports their goals for student safety. The London Grid for Learning (LGfL) provides a filtered broadband connection, network services, online content, and support communities for schools across London. LGfL required an Internet content filtering solution that would provide the highest level of categorization accuracy and platform scalability. They also needed a solution that would provide the scalability and flexibility they needed as they expanded their services to 3000 schools and 2 million pupils.
Key challenges include:
- Internet content filtering that didn’t interrupt the learning experience
- A network-based solution for filtering 3K+ schools, 2M+ pupils, and handle one billion of URL requests a day
- Minimal network degradation and administrative overhead
- Easy to integrate with existing and planned management systems
Netsweeper deployed a high-performance filtering system that adapted to the changing needs and increasing demands of LGfL’s massive customer base. In network filtering has kept up with the growing demands of internet usage. Non-technical users have a bespoke customer care portal (developed by the Netsweeper WebAdmin API) to manage their web filtering policies. Each policy server is load balanced, providing redundancy.
More recently, as the COVID-19 pandemic sent people home to work and study, Netsweeper was able to help LGfL rapidly roll out a comprehensive Windows, Chromebook, and iPad filtering solution to over 100K pupils.
“With Netsweeper, LGfL was able to meet both their requirements for content accuracy, and for scaling up to being one of the UK’s largest educational service providers.”