At Pine Belt Mental Healthcare, Internet access is a crucial part of daily operations for the institute. Employees must collaborate with other doctors, conduct research, share patient records, and manage billings. Paul was in need of a web filter solution that could provide a safe and secure internet experience while maintaining the control to apply granular user-based policies. For example, Paul wanted to only grant the Marketing team access to Facebook and Twitter but block these websites to other departments. “Having granular rules that differentiated between users was important in order to optimize productivity. We wanted to continue building out our social media presence, but limit access only to the team that was directly tasked with that responsibility,” Metzger said. Additionally, since there were a number of corporate-owned devices that employees were using offnetwork, Paul needed to extend his filtering policies to users beyond the network perimeter. “Our existing filtering solution gave us no visibility into how these devices were being used once they left the network,” Metzger added. Paul tested SquidGuard, a URL redirector that uses blacklists with the proxy software Squid; but he ran into multiple issues. SquidGuard was not easy to install and managing the rule sets to block certain domains quickly became chaotic as his requirements evolved. Paul needed a solution that was easy-to-use and had granular feature sets. With these specific pain points in mind, Paul began to research various web security solutions that could provide a granular level of security without sacrificing ease of use.
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