New York K-12 School District Uses OpenDNS to Add Security, Redundancy to its Network, Leverage Zero-Downtime Network

San Francisco (PRWEB) November 12, 2008

OpenDNS, the award-winning navigation service that makes the Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable, today announced Elmira City Schools has chosen OpenDNS to add a layer of redundancy to its existing Web content filtering services and to leverage OpenDNS's zero-downtime network. Elmira City School District is a pre-kindergarten through twelfth-grade school district in upstate New York. OpenDNS is the world's-largest, fastest-growing DNS service, today used by more than 10,000 schools and school districts.

Like other school districts, Elmira strives to continually improve the performance of its network and ensure the Internet is available to students as a learning tool. Initially network administrators at Elmira chose to run OpenDNS on Wi-Fi networks to boost reliability and add an extra layer of security to its prexisiting filtering system, blocking access to inappropriate content at several of its school sites. The team chose to use the initial deployment on the Wi-Fi networks as a test of OpenDNS.

The test was a success and OpenDNS had delivered 100 percent uptime to Elmira since the District enabled the service.

"For security reasons, public Wi-Fi networks at some of our school locations are firewalled from the rest of our network, which means clients on those networks can't use our own internal DNS," said Jason Johnson, Network Administrator for Elmira City School District. "We decided to try OpenDNS for clients on those networks, and we liked it so much that that we started using it for all of our Internet DNS queries."

For Johnson and his team, proxies and anonymizers, tools students often use to bypass Web filters, are a mounting problem. But they're no match for OpenDNS and its industry-leading proxy-blocking category. Elmira has the category blocked across all school networks and Johnson notes, "The additional layer of filtering has been particularly handy to reduce students' use of proxies and their access to inappropriate sites."

"I recommend OpenDNS to other system administrators," he continued. "We get fast, reliable DNS and other useful features at zero cost."

About OpenDNS
OpenDNS is the world's largest and fastest-growing DNS provider, making the Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable for millions of people around the world. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company operates a new kind of recursive Domain Name System (DNS) service that enables the delivery of services like Web content filtering and industry-leading phishing protection through the DNS, free and without requiring users to download or install software. OpenDNS is thoroughly committed to operating the best DNS platform in the world and to improving the Internet. For more information about OpenDNS, please visit: http://www.opendns.com

About Elmira City School District
Elmira City School District is a K-12 School District located in upstate New York, USA. For more information, please visit http://www.elmiracityschools.com

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