Sierra Corporation Deploys SmoothWall School Guardian at Friendship Schools and Carlos Rosario Schools

Sierra Corporation, an Information Technology solutions provider, announced today their deployment of SmoothWall School Guardian at Friendship Public Charter Schools and Carlos Rosario Public Charter Schools. Total deployment will protect more than 10 buildings across 9 campuses, and over 5000 users.

“At Sierra Corporation, we offer only the best products to our customers, and SmoothWall's School Guardian product combines the best of reliability and performance,” said Rassul B. Hashemi, President, Sierra Corporation. “Because School Guardian is based on the popular open source project SmoothWall Express, we know it will offer all of the benefits of Open Source—reliability, quality, transparency—while being backed by the kind of live customer support only a corporate company can provide.”

In the fast paced world of Internet security, Sierra Corporation considers it absolutely essential to provide our customers with the kind of speed and integrity that SmoothWall delivers. While School Guardian has its roots in the Linux community, it is tightly integrated with LDAP/Active Directory authentication, allowing the software to sit comfortably within Microsoft Windows Server based environments. Active Directory integration also means the Schools' IT staff can continue to use the software they are familiar with, reducing School Guardian's learning curve to near zero, and eliminating costly training sessions. In other words, "it just works".

Sierra Corporation will also be deploying the excellent SmoothWall School Guardian Internet censorship software to block any content that the schools deem unfit for education. School Guardian automatically blocks Internet anonymizers, such as the Tor Network, and features an exceptionally fast text scanning engine. School Guardian's points-based scoring system helps to allow legitimate resources, such as a medical sites, while blocking non-useful content. Schools can also specify their own level of control by overriding the software's built-in filters to make it more or less restrictive.

“The nature of our site is that one or two classrooms at a time will be using the Internet,” said Donald L. Hense, Chairman of Friendship Public Charter School. “We needed to offer reliable and high-speed wireless Internet access for research as part of our commitment to providing state-of-the-art facilities to our students and faculty.” School Guardian completely eliminates the kinds of problems that can arise from unfettered Internet access in a school environment, and enables FPCS and CRPCS to give their students and faculty ubiquitous "always on" Internet across their entire campuses.

 

About Sierra Corporation
Sierra Corporation has been offering a vast range of Information Technology solutions to large and small business enterprises, nonprofit organizations, and individuals since 1998, including everything from creating and maintaining networks to Web application development, hardware/software sales and services. We provide our clients with strategic and analytic services together with planning, design and implementation. We are there when you need us for all of your IT needs.

 

About Friendship Public Charter School
Friendship Public Charter School is the District of Columbia’s largest community of public charter schools, serving nearly 4,000 students in grades pre-k to 12. Friendship is truly an effective system of public schools. We take seriously our responsibility to provide the best education possible to the nearly 4,000 students whose parents have chosen our school community. On each Friendship campus, students benefit from innovative, research-based classroom instruction, 21st century technology, attractive school facilities and an exceptional team of caring teachers, administrators and staff. To learn more about Friendship Public Charter Schools, please visit http://www.friendshipschools.org

About Carlos Rosario Public Charter School
The Carlos Rosario International School offers an array of classes integrated within award-winning adult education programs which are considered models at the national and international level. Courses are taught by a a distinguished faculty which includes forty-two educators with advanced degrees and educational training. Class options range from the basic English Literacy and life skills necessary for successful introduction to American life, to Career Level english and Professional Certificate Courses in Technology and Culinary Arts. Classes are offered in the morning, afternoon and evening to accommodate differing students' work and family schedules. For more information on the Rosario Public Charter School, please visit http://www.carlosrosario.org

About SmoothWall
SmoothWall began as an open source firewall project, which now protects a million networks worldwide. The SmoothWall company produces firewall, web security/content filtering, email security/anti-spam and bandwidth management (QoS) products with commercial support. SmoothWall are proud to be members of the Internet Watch Foundation - a not-for-profit organization working in partnership with the police, governments, and the wider online community to combat the availability of criminally obscene content on the Internet. For more information on SmoothWall, please visit http://www.smoothwall.net/