While IT admins buy, install and maintain web-filters on a day to day basis, we believe that in order for reporting data to be actionable, access to these reports needs to be delegated out to the right stake-holders. This includes Principals, Guidance Counselors and Parents. Today, we are taking a step in this direction with the release of our Delegated Administration feature that has been a huge ask from so many of our customers.

Support tickets for web-filtering in K-12 districts generally fall into two large buckets:

• Requests for unblocking websites.
• Requests for pulling user reports for disciplinary purposes.

In addition to these routine requests, district IT also occasionally has to respond to detection of disturbing behavior by students. For instance – a student’s declaration to end her life through a Facebook post. Such incidents place immense burden on the district IT by not only requiring them to detect such incidents reliably, but also being able to respond to them in a timely fashion.

In 2013, Securly pioneered the ability to have Educators whitelist sites that were blocked in the classroom. This feature alone saved IT Admins time while saving Educators the frustration that comes from having critical resources blocked in the classroom. Now, with the ability to delegate the pulling of user reports, we believe that Securly has become a true “set-and-forget” solution for IT.

During the feature design phase, it emerged that the ability to provide granular access to reporting data was a key requirement for larger districts. Securly allows Principals to have access to reports for only the students in their school building.

Further, IT admins can now rely on Principals and Guidance Counsellors to monitor the Flagged Activity sections of its reporting UI for detection of any disturbing behavior on their networks. These alerts are a direct result of the company’s proprietary Artificial Intelligence algorithms that analyze students’ social posts for negative sentiment. By delegating this critical task of student behavior to the relevant staff members, the district IT is able to focus on infrastructure planning and remediating support tickets as before.

We have worked closely with several customers to carefully design and execute on this feature. One such customer is Edmonds School District in the Seattle area where 15,000 students across 30+ buildings are protected by the company’s web-filtering technology. Says Chris Bailey, Manager, IT operations at the District – “The Delegated Administration feature that Securly has just announced will really enhance the way we use the product, and empower our school administrators access to the information they need, right at their fingertips. We also anticipate that it will reduce the time it takes for the district to investigate and resolve student discipline issues, as we can provide more employees with the right level of access.”

Throughout the summer we will be announcing few features and initiatives that are designed to give parents and the right stake-holders within schools timely access to student reporting data. So stay tuned for more!