Safe Search Engines For Kids

In today's virtual world era where kids have everything at their fingertips, it's indeed a promising as well as scary situation for today's parents to leave the kids exposed to theworld wide cobweb of web.

It's indeed need of the hour to implement safe search engines for kids both at home as well as schools. It will ensure safer grounds of web exploring/surfing. Curiosity and anxiety levels of ever hungry kids are breaded on safer grounds, ensuring focused and hurdle free growth.

Two years ago, we co-founded Securly after having spent several years building enterprise security products. The genesis of Securly was when Vinay observed his six year old nephew accidentally stumble upon an unsafe YouTube video on an iPad. Given our entrepreneurial interests and backgrounds in security - this was the perfect "opportunity" we were seeking. We immediately quit our jobs at McAfee and Huawei-Symantec, and built an OpenDNS+Barracuda combo focused on K-12 needs. School IT admins now enjoyed the simplicity of a 5-min DNS based deployment and the granularity of full-blown proxy or appliance vendors. Our invention had found an instant product-market fit as IT admins latched onto the cloud-based alternative to traditional appliances vision.

However, what started as a purely entrepreneurial pursuit changed into a "double bottom-line" mission statement the minute we stepped into a school campus where we saw Securly in action keeping the students focused and safe online - a truly surreal moment for us. This was at our first customer school here - Milpitas Unified - in the Silicon Valley area. We wondered if two immigrant engineers with no sales background could dream of selling to the rest of the United States - especially when schools are known to be hard to sell to. Driven purely by our mission, we pursued the idea and realized that K-12 was in fact the best thing that happened to us. We have found IT admins and Educators from schools across the country, affluent or otherwise underserved, rural and urban, to be extremely welcoming of EdTech start-ups and are a lot more forgiving than the pure enterprise and consumer markets we were used to.

In the two years we've been providing our web-filtering product to schools, we've run into a number of situations wherein schools in underserved communities simply did not have the resources to afford a good web-filtering solution. We've had IT admins in these schools tell us that more than half of their meager EdTech budget was often allocated to acquiring a web-filter. In these situations,

Delivered through the cloud, Securly provides both in-school and take-home filtering through the same admin console.

Zero-touch filtering of 1:1 take home Chromebooks using a Chrome extension that takes seconds to deploy. No proxying. No SSL certificates.

Support for any heterogeneous mix of 1:1 devices including iPads, Windows, Macs, and Android/Nexus tablets.

Securly's cloud based web-filtering solution can be deployed centrally with no need for hardware based appliances. This saves these schools significant amounts of time and money.

Before Securly, the only cloud based solutions that charter schools had access to were what might be described as "domain-blockers." The "all or nothing" approach makes it impossible to secure domains like Google and YouTube which while being de-facto 21st century classroom tools, do contain a lot of content that is inappropriate and distracting. Securly's industry-first "selective proxy" approach gives schools the best of both worlds - the low-cost and simplicity of a cloud-based solution combined with the functionality of an appliance.

Securly was the first web-filter to integrate with Google Apps for single sign-on so schools with a heterogeneous mix of iPads, Windows, Macs, and Chromebooks could get granular policies per their organizational units. With today's offering, Securly allows IT admins to safely pilot and secure their 1:1 Chromebook programs, while reserving the ability to seamlessly expand the filtering to the rest of the district's devices.

The Securly for Chromebooks plugin is available immediately by signing up for a free trial from http://www.securly.com and then visiting the Chrome Web Store or via the Google Apps Admin Console.