Cerebral Palsy League (CPL), a not-for-profit organisation which provides services for people with disabilities in Queensland, has implemented IBM’s Netbox Blue Borderless Internet Compliance program to help analyse its internet usage more easily.
IT manager at CPL, Steve Cantle, says CPL uses the program to identify what causes high spikes in its internet usage to be able to better deal with that.
“[For example], users weren’t aware of it, but streaming radio was consuming large amounts of bandwidth and as a result also reduced the performance of the network. The Netbox was able to clearly identify the users, the machines that were doing that and we were able to act on that.”
Cantel says the program has increased internet performance, and users are now being restricted to only some social media website, whereas prior to implementation, the organisation was operating in an “eyes shut” mode.
CPL initially trialled several different AV products, eventually deciding to go with Netbox after experiencing “instant” results, and was able to implement it into its existing systems with only “minor integration”.
According to the organisation, it has achieved productivity gains of more than $300,000 per annum due to recovering lost working time from its employees.
Cantle says the organisation’s mail server’s performance also improved, as it use to struggle with the old spam system that was installed on an exchange server.
The organisation also uses one of Netbox’s features, SafeChat, to prevent workplace issues such as online bullying, harassment and using social media to make inappropriate comments and allows non-compliant behaviour to be picked up.
“So if bullying was to occur via an internet chat or Facebook or anything like that, the Netbox would alert us and we would take action. That hasn’t occurred yet, but it’s a preventative deterrent,” Cantle says.
“Because the Netbox is at the internet gateway of our network, everything that goes in and out of our network via the internet goes through the Netbox.”
CPL is running the Netbox solution on the Red Hat Linux operating system in an IBM System x3550 M3 server. It also ordered additional processors, memory, fans and redundant array of independent disks storage.