Maine Moves to Cloud-Based Internet Filtering for Public Schools, Libraries

This academic year, Maine became the first state to bring the majority of K-12 public schools onto the same cloud-based Internet filtering service, according to market research by provider OpenDNS.

Through Networkmaine, a unit of the University of Maine system, the nearly 1,000 schools and public libraries have access to OpenDNS Enterprise. Between federal E-Rate funding and the state's universal service fund, they don't have to pay for Internet network connectivity out of their local budgets, said Jeff Letourneau, Networkmaine's executive director.

Ninety percent of the schools and libraries decided to use the managed service provider.

Providing services like this is nothing new to Maine, though. As a result of a rate case filed against an incumbent telephone company in the mid-90s, the Main Public Utilities Commission told the phone company to create a statewide network. 

Networkmaine started running the statewide network that the phone company created. Because the funding doesn't have to come out of local school budgets, Networkmaine has a high participation level for the services it provides.

"But it's also allowed us to do some very innovative and creative things because of that — everything from 1:1 computing to things like this OpenDNS enterprise-level content filtering solution that we just wouldn't be able to do otherwise," Letourneau said.

3 challenges with the old solution

Before making this agreement, Networkmaine was dealing with three challenges with its old solution. It had been sold to vendors three or four different times. When the content filters had problems, they made accessing Web content difficult. And they didn't scale well. 

"The stuff we were using in the past really was having problems scaling to a network of our size, and we really needed to find something that could do that in a very cost-effective manner."

Over the past few years, he's been looking for a new solution. But with a large K-12 network, it hasn't been easy. 

3 criteria for a new solution

Networkmaine wanted districts to meet the Children's Internet Protection Act requirements without having to deal with the technical challenges or financial burdens of implementing their own system. But schools needed to maintain local control over policies.

When they considered which solution to choose, they weren't sure about moving to a managed service provider.

"One of the things I know we were first concerned about is this notion of having your infrastructure, your primary delivery of service, dependent on 'the cloud' -- that thing out there that you have no control over and no knobs."

Through spring trial periods and talking with the sales team, Networkmaine started understanding more of the technology that the service used. Most of their concerns proved to be unfounded. And the cloud service provided fully redundant DNS services from server farms across the world instead of  relying on one or two local server farm locations. 

"The biggest thing to understand is as you look to outsource various products or services or applications, dealing with a company that really understands what cloud means is very important."

In the late spring and summer, Networkmaine worked with schools and libraries to switch over to the service. By the start of school, they were ready for students.

They haven't heard of any performance complaints or outages. And because every school district has their own network configuration, the districts maintain local control.