If you are thinking of finding a way to filter the web content your employees can access you may want to read on and get to know NxFilter.
There are 2 ways to filter web content and control access to certain Web Pages in your organization:
- Web Proxy
- DNS filtering
Web Proxy
With a Web Proxy server you can monitor and control content within your internal network. Web proxy server is an intermediate stop between a client’s request and other servers. Clients connect to proxy server, requesting some service, for example, web page. The Proxy server evaluates the request and sends to another server.
It is commonly used in organizations and companies to ensure that Internet usage conforms with their acceptable usage policy.
Content-filtering web proxy servers provide, controls the content in both directions through the proxy.
With web proxy you can filter:
- URL
- DNS blacklists
- URL regex filtering
- MIME
- Content keyword filtering
DNS Filtering
This is second method of content filtering. It uses DNS protocol with filtering ability.
DNS filtering is faster than the Web Proxy because there is no need the web traffic to go through one point – web proxy.
In this post we will introduce NxFilter – DNS-filtering software that started as a DNS-filter, but now it provides web-proxy based filtering as well.
NxFilter complete solution for controlling content within your Company
With NXFilter you will get faster and lighter web filtering that one DNS-filtering has, and also use the power of content-filtering of Web Proxy servers.
NxFilter keeps local cache for DNS lookup
After you install NxFilter in your network, you will see boosting of Internet speed. With local copy of DNS lookup, DNS queries will be faster because the NxFilter keeps cache for DNS response from its upstream DNS servers.
With NxFilter you can differentiate users and apply different filtering policies
DNS filtering, compared to traditional web proxy servers, had limits in the authentication part in the past. But, NxFilter provides 4 types of user authentication:
- IP based authentication
- Password based authentication
- LDAP authentication
- Single sign-on with Active Directory
Application Filtering with NxFilter
NxFilter has 2 agents NxLogon and NxClient and you can control applications like: uTorrent, Skype, UltraSurf, Tor. So and you can block application to some users.
With DNS-filtering you can’t filter by keywords against URL, but NxFilter can. NxFilter provides web-proxy filtering through its 2 agents. They are local proxies and they can do anything that web-proxy can, like:
- safe-search
- URL keyword filtering
- IP host blocking
Someone may say that with these web-proxy features NxFilter will have reduced performance and faster filtering can be done with DNS-filtering, but this is not true. The Web-proxy agents work as local proxies only for one user, so the network performance is very high.
Filtering every protocol that uses DNS
With web-proxy filtering you can filter http and https protocols. With DNS-filtering in addition to http and https you can filter FTP, P2P and all protocols that use DNS.
NxFilter is Free software
NxFilter is free but there are companies that sell database with categorized domains by different criteria (blackists). With these data you can block users’ access to web pages by category, for example pornography, gambling, shopping, social networks, etc.
When you install NxFilter in your company you can insert manual web-pages or domains that users can or can’t access. But, predefined web-sites or categories are a good option to avoid a lot of manual work.
VapourApps brings NxFilter to your organization
Here at VaporApps we use NxFilter for internal usage. We separate employees by categories and define their access policy by categories. Here is an example of NxFilter Policy page. From the picture below you can see way of creating user policy and how you can block categories:
NxFilter Free Time for all users
With NxFilter you can define when all blocked content will be available to users. This option is NxFilter Free Time. For example you can define part(s) of the working day, for example lunch time, when all employees can gain access to all web pages:
Example of Blocked Resource
So, there are many options that you can configure with NxFilter and improve your employee productivity. We can implement this software directly to your organization as part of our Private Cloud solution – VapourApps or as a separate tool, just the NxFilter.
Call us today and gain better Productivity within your Company.
VapourApps +38978 456 978
