Opendium Blogs

We are very proud to have been awarded Corporate Vision Magazine's Best Online Safety Specialists Technology Innovator Award.

19th March 2020

Opendium would like to provide reassurance to our customers regarding our ability to continue to operate during the ongoing Coronovirus pandemic. To this end, please read this statement from the directors outlining the steps we are taking to maintain operations.  This statement is also available in PDF format.

Opendium has submitted the document below as a proposal for discussion at the UK Internet Governance Forum 2020.

The Birmingham Grid for Learning, Rotherham Schools Connect, Worcestershire County Council and Essex County Council have all announced that they will no longer be providing internet connectivity and filtering to schools after the end of March 2020.  These announcements prompted us to consider how we can best support those schools who are now looking for a replacement service.

Since 2005, Opendium has been helping schools across the UK to protect children.  The most obvious part of our work is to protect children from the internet's many dangers whilst safeguarding and promoting the huge number of ways that the internet can be used for their benefit.  Beyond that, people live much of their lives online these days and our products are perfectly placed to spo

We have submitted a consultation response, which is published below, to the Government's recent Online Harms whitepaper.  The response answers several of the consultation questions, but also aims to provide some insight into the work we do and the problems we face helping schools to safeguard the children who are under their care.

We have recently rolled out some updates to our default web proxy overrides, which are explained in this blog article.

Overview

Both Web Gateway and UTM provide the same overrides system under the Web Proxy -> Filter Override Editor and Web Proxy -> Filter Overrides & Walled Garden pages.  The overrides allow parts of the system's functionality to be disabled for requests to certain types of content.  Overrides are usually used for the following purposes:

We recently attended a conference held by the Police Service's Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU). The conference was intended to provide an opportunity for a wide variety of organisations involved in online safety to get together and discuss topical issues. There were delegates from online safety suppliers, such as ourselves, as well as from the Home Office, SO15 Counter Terrorism Command, CTIRU, internet service providers, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and the UK Safer Internet Centre (UKSIC) to name a few.

One of our customers reported problems accessing Lloyds Bank's corporate payments gateway, having already called Lloyds.  Lloyds had told them that there were no problems and to clear cookies, add the site to the ActiveX trusted sites list, etc.  Still not working, so must be a problem with the customer's firewall.

The first thing we did was to point a browser at https://payments.corporate.lloydsbank.com/ (on an independent internet connection) and nothing happened - it just sat there waiting.  So clearly Lloyds were having some problems.

Moving services into the cloud, which have traditionally been handled internally, is increasingly popular for schools. It is a very attractive proposition: schools can reduce the amount of space dedicated to computer hardware and save administration costs.

For services such as email, this is often a no-brainer. Using a cloud based email system means you don't need a technician to spend their time applying security updates to the email server. You don't need to operate a hardware replacement cycle for the server or allow for premature hardware failures.