Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA seem to grab all the headlines as legislative mandates force changes in IT operations. But unless you have school-age children, or you are an IT administrator for a school district or library, you might not be aware of the IT demands legislated by the Federal Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) issued in December 2000. CIPA dictates that schools and libraries that receive federal funding (i.e., pretty much all public institutions) must implement policies and technology measures to block or filter access to inappropriate content such as pornography and other materials considered harmful to minors. To comply with the mandate, school districts all across the country scurried to implement URL blocking and content filtering.

Such was the case at Patchogue-Medford School District in the Long Island area of New York State. IT administrators at “Pat-Med” installed first one filtering appliance, and then another. Pat-Med is now on its third iteration of URL/content filtering product, and they have finally found one they like.

Scott Warmbrand is the computer systems administrator in the Office of Information Technology for the school district. Warmbrand says the district tried several enterprise-level secure Web gateway products for the filtering function, and he recalls those times as “a bad experience all the way around.” The products were simply too complex and too expensive for his district’s needs. Since then, he has installed Network Composer from Cymphonix Corporation, and he says this product “does the job we need it to do.”

I previously wrote about Cymphonix in March 2006, and since then, the company has found its niche in the crowded secure Web gateway market. Cymphonix has set its sights on the under-served SMB and educational markets. The company’s Network Composer appliance has most of the same features as offered by competitors like Blue Coat Systems, Websense and IronPort Systems, but at a price point and with a user interface that is more pleasing to organizations like Warmbrand’s. (For example, compare the Websense cost of $25,000 per year to Cymphonix’s cost of $23,000 for three years.)

“Cymphonix offers an ‘ease of management’ that we didn’t find with other filtering products,” says Warmbrand. “The school district doesn’t have very many technicians to oversee all the technology we have, so we needed a product that is very easy to use.”

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.