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Iprism:
Technical Overview:  PC Editors Choice review
The St. Bernard iPrism filtering appliance
combines a compact hardware unit and a full-featured
administrative console. Its content filtering is the easiest to
administer and maintain of any business-level product we
reviewed here.
Although the sleek Pentium-equipped iPrism
appliance has a Unix-based operating system, like that of the
8e6 R2000L and the NetSpective WebFilter, only the iPrism has a
Java-based console that let us get started without running Unix
utilities—a huge plus.
The only drawback to the Java approach: On a
500-MHz Pentium II with 128MB of RAM, we waited over a minute
for the utility—and Java Virtual Machine—to launch. The
consoles for the other products reviewed, whether Web-based or
not, loaded in a few seconds.
It's worth the wait, however. This extremely
capable tool makes quick work of adding users and passwords.
Like the Windows-based ScoutWeb administrator tool, the iPrism's
console features a rich interface that uses the mouse to
simplify common chores. We found it easy to define policies for
two types of users. Managers got unrestricted access to news,
travel, and finance; ordinary users were locked out. The Java
interface supports a richer interface than the HTML/DHTML
favored by other products. For example, we "painted"
policies onto a grid representing the hours in a workweek. With
this feature, it was a cinch to simulate a schedule letting
users access news during lunch or after work.
The iPrism's filtering scheme relies on a
central repository of restricted content, updated from St.
Bernard's home office after hours. With 60 categories of
filterable content, iPrism administrators have extremely fine
control over surfing. Besides the obvious objectionable
categories, others, like news, health-care information, travel,
and cultural information, can also be intercepted.
The bottom line: We weren't able to circumvent
the iPrism often. Like the other hardware-based solutions,
how-ever, the iPrism was fooled by cached URLs on Google and Ask
Jeeves. Of course, if we clicked beyond the first level of
cached pages, the filtering blocked properly. While one solution
would be to restrict these sites, blocking a tool as powerful as
Google might be a hard sell.
Like the other hardware vendors reviewed, St.
Bernard promises that all categorized URLs are inspected by
human eyes. Submitted URLs are reviewed by St. Bernard's
reviewers at the home office, categorized, and then included in
the catalog of URLs downloaded to units worldwide at the end of
each day. We liked the ability here to grant override rights to
trusted users.
For a such a low-maintenance tool, the iPrism
goes to surprising lengths to keep administrators in the loop.
Its 19 canned reports, called queries, show hourly, daily, and
weekly statistics for network usage, blocked sites, and detailed
activity on your site. Although it's not very graphical, we
found the reporting quite flexible. In addition to these
reports, you can also set triggers or alerts for various
criteria and send e-mail to administrators when a user browses
forbidden content or when network bandwidth usage reaches a
certain threshold of activity.
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