Today we’ve announced the immediate availability of Block Page Bypass, an innovative feature that allows the granting of special permissions to bypass OpenDNS filtering without the use of any software or any appliance. The announcement is significant because it makes OpenDNS Web content filtering a fitting service for a much wider group of companies and organizations.
Since our Web content filtering began growing in popularity years ago, we’ve heard from potential customers that one of the only hurdles to adoption is the lack of a Block Page Bypass feature. The cost savings and ease-of-use of our service make a very compelling switch-from-Websense or Blue Coat-argument, but for some potential customers, the inability to assign different people the permission to bypass specific categories or websites made our solution unusable in their organization. For those customers, we’re proud to have a solution available today that will liberate them from the high cost and frustrating experience of managing on-premise filtering appliances.
In building this feature we looked at how the appliance vendors perform this function today and realized right away that their approach is highly inefficient. In order to allow you to bypass one site, they often have to proxy all traffic through their appliance. Anyone who has run a network or managed a filtering box knows this slows down the network significantly and introduces a single point of failure. The approach we’ve developed is no less intelligent than what you’ve come to expect from OpenDNS. We proxy only the sites being bypassed, so in effect we give you more granular filtering without decreasing overall performance. The idea that better security should not impact performance is a theme we talk about a lot internally and is something we think about with everything we do.
Right out of the gate this feature is available to all OpenDNS Enterprise customers, but later this year will be available in Deluxe as an add-on.
