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The education sector has a wide range of special email and Internet security requirements. Educational institutions have very diverse and demanding policy needs. These needs relate to the size of the organization and the unique requirements of users, including students of various ages, as well as staff.
The challenge for education institutions is to provide a safe working and learning environment for all users, and also to provide appropriate access to resources. Due to the unique position of educators with respect to their legal obligations to safeguard the health and welfare of their students, if there has been a failure in preventing access to illegal or inappropriate content by minors, the exposure caused can be devastating - both in legal action and in loss of professional reputation.
SchoolMarshal provides solutions which are thorough, providing deep security analysis and policy enforcement, they are also among the most flexible and scalable to accommodate the needs of educational environments. Marshal's flexible pricing options and generous educational discounts make Marshal the solution of choice for educational institutions the world over.
SchoolMarshal provides a range of solutions that provide specific benefits for the education sector.
Enforcement of Policies agains Inappropriate Content
Whether an education customer is teaching school-age children or university students, they all have strict standards on how learning and communication tools (like email and the Internet) can be used. Common requirements are the prohibition of pornography, profanity, racist or hate content and other inappropriate content. Universities and colleges often take a pro-active approach to issues such as harassment and racism by banning the use of certain words in email.
MailMarshal and WebMarshal can help educational institutions meet their legal obligations by blocking access to inappropriate web sites and blocking email messages containing offensive language. MailMarshal and WebMarshal are completely flexible, allowing faculty members to access different types of web or email content than students.
MailMarshal with Image Analyzer can detect and block pornographic images attached to emails. This makes it possible to control pornography being shared around your email environment. With WebMarshal you can not only block access to pornographic web content, but also establish whitelists of approved content and limit student access to these approved websites.
Option Modules for MailMarshal and WebMarshal: We offer optional anti-virus, anti-spyware, and url subscription modules to further enhance and protect your school from the latest network threats.
Marshal solutions can enforce any number and combination of policies, making it possible for you to implement even the most sophisticated rules and regulations.
Managing Large Numbers of Users
Universities and colleges have requirements for very high numbers of users. Often these number in the tens of thousands, and there are thousands of new and expired accounts every semester. Marshal solutions provide tight integration with user databases such as Active Directory and LDAP. This makes it easy to maintain, authenticate and apply policy enforcement to this ever-changing user environment.
Marshal solutions are high performing and very scalable, able to support thousands of users on a single server. Marshal solutions can be easily load balanced and built into multi-server arrays to add redundancy. Management of multiple servers is simple and easy through a centrally controlled console. No other solution in the industry can boast the enterprise-class management features available in Marshal solutions.
Sophisticated Security
SchoolMarshal knows that students are inventive and canny users who will try to bend the rules or see what they can get away with. Many other content security solutions say that they can control attachments or block pornography, but often those products are easy to circumvent. Common tricks include changing file extensions (for instance. rename an .mp3 file to .txt) or applying double name extensions (for instance, .mp3 .txt). These simple changes can bypass many other products on the market - but not Marshal solutions.
With SchoolMarshal solutions, once you ban file types (such as .EXE), users cannot bypass the restriction. They cannot hide and EXE inside of a PowerPoint presentation. They cannot hide it by renaming it or placing it in a Zip file. SchoolMarshal solutions will detect it and block it. If you ban certain file types, you can apply that ban to Internet downloads as well as email. This allows you to block backdoors to your security policies. This includes webmail accounts such as Gmail or Hotmail.
Issues such as plagiarism are also a concern for educational customers. With MailMarshal, you can search for specific passages of text, even inside a Word document or other file type, and record who is sharing assignments or re-using text.
Legal Compliance
These days, educational institutions come under continuous and intense scrutiny from the public and the government. Issues such as bullying, sexual harassment, racism, copyright, pornography, religion and chat room predators mean that educational institutions are required to take every reasonable and practical step to protect children in their charge.
Marshal solutions allow you to monitor and control all of these issues to the highest legal standards. They are effective, are highly flexible, and provide detailed activity reporting - so you can identify and deal with any issues that might arise.
More CIPA information from the US FCC
Consumer Facts
Full ruling text
In the USA, legislation such as CIPA (Child Internet Protection Act) and DOPA (Delete Online Predators Act) are already in force. These laws mandate that schools and other publicly funded organizations such as libraries block access to pornographic content, as well as online chat services that can expose young children to sexual predators. Other jurisdictions are beginning to follow suit.
Marshal solutions can block access to pornographic websites and prohibited chat rooms, and can control pornographic email attachments. Marshal solutions can be a significant component in showing compliance with these kinds of requirements.
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