Industry: Public Sector
Location: Australia
Products Used: Web Security
Hobart City Council Establishes Security Sustainable Future with Websense®
Hobart is Australia’s second oldest city and today has a quality of life that is the envy of other capital cities. Indeed, Hobart City Council proudly promotes Hobart as “The way life should be,” indicating that living in Hobart is as good as it gets. Today, around 48,000 people live in Hobart and around 200,000 in the Greater Hobart area.
The Council currently offers more than 300 services to the community at large. The Hobart City Council has a proud record of serving its community through good governance and service excellence. In recent years, just as the Council has been successful in achieving quality certification to International Standard ISO 9001:2000 for all operational areas, so too has been its commitment in the provision of a secure IT infrastructure for its 700 employees.
The Problem
With a distributed workforce located across 15 sites (including two major offices in the city, an Aquatic Centre, waste water treatment plants, car parks and several other remote offices), the Council takes a proactive approach in the provision of security to its employees wherever they are located.
Through the sensible use of Websense® Web Security, the Council protects employees from exposure to potentially malicious Web content. From an occupational health and safety viewpoint, the Council aims to protect its staff from inappropriate content and at the same time minimise its exposure to legal liability.
The Information Services Unit reviewed various solutions to protect the Council and decided on a smart Web security solution that would enable better management of Internet content. This would ensure individual employee access to business information while protecting the organisation as a whole from being exposed to the worst of the Web.
The Information Services Unit went to market with a view to achieving “a set and forget” Web security solution which would enable the unit to concentrate its resources on adding strategic value to the organisation in other IT programs.
The Solution
After reviewing the major players in the market, Information Services chose Websense, on the basis that the solution achieves the balance between employee Internet access and enforcing corporate Internet usage policies. It also enables the IT team to use custom policies to manage Internet use and network traffic.
Attractive to Information Services was the range of classifications native to Websense and the ability to control specific Web addresses. Regular automated site classifications combined with administrative inspection has ensured up-to-date classification of URLs, protocols, and applications.
Websense also features Acceptable Use Policies which allows the establishment of flexible Internet use policies. Administrators can choose between Allow, Block, Continue, Quota, Block by Bandwidth, and Block by File Type options. Access can also be managed by filtering sites based on time of day. Typically a tighter access policy can be applied during business hours and relaxed out of work time.
The Websense system has many pre-classified site categories enabling access to be provided or revoked based on corporate policies. This customisation feature alone provided the Council with the sense that the hard work had already been done by Websense in meeting immediate requirements.
Reporting features have enabled simplified reports of user traffic and bandwidth utilisation. Real-time and historical views of Internet usage have been used to refine endpoint security, minimise legal liability, improve employee productivity, and better manage service bandwidth.
The Results
The Hobart City Council’s Information Services unit has demonstrated leadership on many fronts, none more so than in IT security and business continuity and these actions have ensured the sustainability of Council’s business and community operations.
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