Control your branch office‘s Internet usage
The Problem
The Internet can sometimes be viewed as a necessary evil when it comes to staff browsing. Unrestricted use can lead to legal liability, excess download costs, productivity losses, and inappropriate use of corporate bandwidth. This is particularly an issue when it comes to branch offices.
Does it make sense to channel the branch office Internet traffic via the head office link so it hairpins back out to the Internet? You can then monitor their browsing & and protect them from http malware but it slows down the link and creates double handling of data. Or do you split tunnel your data and let your users run an encrypted corporate user VPN tunnel as well as unencrypted, unrestricted Internet? This makes sense in a geographically distributed situation, e.g., if your branch office is in Singapore and your head office is in Sydney.
We have solutions for both these situations.
The Breakthrough
Split Tunnelling Solution 1
The exciting thing is that you can now let a branch access the internet direct through a small Cisco 877 or 878 router but still filter their traffic. Yes, this requires reference to a third party web filter but you don't have to route all traffic via head office, just the URLs for checking.
Email us to enable this feature on Cisco routers
Split Tunnelling Solution 2
The web filtering solution is easy to implement with no software or hardware to install. Simply channel your web traffic through WebGuard’s distributed servers and you can stop web browsing abuse/time wasting, control downloads, stop viruses from entering the workplace through Internet browsing (includes WebMail) and get detailed usage reports.
This solution worked well in the Singapore-Sydney situation outlined above.
Features:
| • | Logs: Detailed logs of Who has browsed What and When. |
| • | Reporting/Alerts: Provides hourly/daily/weekly/monthly reports of top users and most popular sites. |
| • | Data Reports: Summary reports of how much, and how long your people are browsing. |
| • | Offensive/pornographic sites: Protection against offensive web site access in the work place. |
| • | Manage: Access to the web by times, file types, key words, and sites by individual, group or company wide rules. |
| • | Authentication: Username/password built into WebGuard. |
To find out more
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Hairpin tunneling
Cisco IOS URL Filtering can act as a backup or as a failover mechanism if the third-party URL filtering server is unavailable or unreachable. A third-party URL filtering server such as Websense is present at the headquarters location. Each branch office points to this server at the headquarters for its URL filtering needs. The requests can be cached at the branch itself using Cisco IOS URL Filtering. Additionally, if the URL filtering server is unreachable, the Cisco IOS URL Filtering static list will act as a backup filtering mechanism, as shown.
Cisco IOS URL Filtering supports up to 256 static URLs that can be configured in the router's NVRAM. These can be a combination of permitted or denied URLs. Cisco IOS Software will not make a lookup request to any external filtering servers for the HTTP traffic (GET request) that is destined to one of the domains in the exclusive list specified.
To find out more
Email us to enable this feature on Cisco routers