Fastvue and Sophos Working Together To Keep Students Safe Online (Product Demo)

Fastvue and cyber-security experts Sophos have been working together for many years now to provide network security and internet usage reporting to a range of industries including government, corporate (small to enterprise) and education.

With recent developments in Fastvue’s Reporter software and Sophos’ XG firewall platform, there are some new, very compelling advantages for schools and the education sector to adopt the two complementary solutions to safeguard and protect students online.

Fastvue was invited as a guest presenter in a recent webinar hosted by Sophos to help demonstrate how Fastvue Sophos Reporter together with the Sophos XG platform can provide schools with everything they need to safeguard and detect students at risk of self-harm, extremism/radicalization, and anti-social/unacceptable online behavior.

Videos from the webinar are available below, and the full webinar is available here: Fastvue and Sophos – Working Together to Safeguard Students Online (Full Webinar).

A Fastvue and Sophos Collaboration

Whilst school curriculums are built around learning, discovery, and exploration, it’s no secret that this highly impressionable environment can also present the risk of students finding and consuming inappropriate material. As a result, we’re now collaborating closely with Sophos to safeguard children in schools by monitoring and reporting on disturbing behavior, with the ultimate goal of looking out for the welfare of students.

Sophos Global Solutions Engineer, Ben Verschaeren described the benefit of the partnership by explaining:

“The reason why we’ve partnered with Fastvue is although our firewalls have got a really palatable and attractive reporting engine, it doesn’t always hit the sweet spot we need for education.” - Sophos Global Solutions Engineer, Ben Verschaeren.

The Importance Of Safeguarding Students

As explored in our previous blog on Monitoring Internet Usage to Safeguard Students in Schools, Fastvue has a series of functions available to safeguard students by monitoring access to self-harm, extremist, or inappropriate content.

Using a combination of real-time alerts and reports on search terms, content keywords and teacher overrides, the software is able to track student browsing activity, flagging areas of concern to non-technical staff members such as student services, pastoral care officers or the Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL) in charge of the school.

Sophos For Education…With Fastvue

Fastvue Co-founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) Scott Glew, recently appeared as a guest presenter in a webinar hosted by Sophos. The presentation focused on firewall security and cybersecurity with a specific overview of how Fastvue Reporter compliments Sophos technology within the educational sector.

During the webinar, Ben Verschaeren discussed the importance of the collaboration between Sophos and Fastvue. He explained:

“When it comes to things like identifying at-risk students and detecting suspicious online behaviour, when it comes to real-time alerting on certain context or search terms, things that might be deemed unacceptable, unfortunately our on-box reporting engine doesn’t offer that.” - Sophos Global Solutions Engineer, Ben Verschaeren.

Fastvue Reporter Product Demo

Whilst we have a series of short videos on our YouTube channel that explore the features of our software, we have captured some snippets of the recent webinar below to show just how easy the system is to use.

Taken from the recent webinar, the following videos are presented by Co-Founder and CPO, Scott Glew with a clear overview of the most common features used within schools to monitor and report on student browsing behavior.

Real-Time Alerts on Suspicious Search Terms

Receiving Alerts on Keywords Within Visited Web Pages

Safeguarding Keyword Lists

In the video above, Scott refers to the 'Drugs' keyword list he uploaded to Sophos XG. Please find this keyword lists below, along with some other handy keywords for schools:

Segmenting Alerts By Cohorts Or Departments

Running and Scheduling Student Safeguarding Reports

Teacher Overrides

Product Demo: Simple Internet Usage Reports on Users

If you’re interested in watching the full webinar, the video is available here: Fastvue and Sophos – Working Together to Safeguard Students Online (Full Webinar).

Like The Look Of Fastvue Reporter? Download Our Free 30-day Trial

If you’ve enjoyed these demos and feel as though Fastvue Reporter will work well within your organisation, we welcome you to download our free 30-day trial today to try it for yourself!