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 .