Today we’ve announced the immediate availability of Block Page Bypass, an innovative feature that allows the granting of special permissions to bypass OpenDNS filtering without the use of any software or any appliance. The announcement is significant because it makes OpenDNS Web content filtering a fitting service for a much wider group of companies and organizations.
Since our Web content filtering began growing in popularity years ago, we’ve heard from potential customers that one of the only hurdles to adoption is the lack of a Block Page Bypass feature. The cost savings and ease-of-use of our service make a very compelling switch-from-Websense or Blue Coat-argument, but for some potential customers, the inability to assign different people the permission to bypass specific categories or websites made our solution unusable in their organization. For those customers, we’re proud to have a solution available today that will liberate them from the high cost and frustrating experience of managing on-premise filtering appliances.
In building this feature we looked at how the appliance vendors perform this function today and realized right away that their approach is highly inefficient. In order to allow you to bypass one site, they often have to proxy all traffic through their appliance. Anyone who has run a network or managed a filtering box knows this slows down the network significantly and introduces a single point of failure. The approach we’ve developed is no less intelligent than what you’ve come to expect from OpenDNS. We proxy only the sites being bypassed, so in effect we give you more granular filtering without decreasing overall performance. The idea that better security should not impact performance is a theme we talk about a lot internally and is something we think about with everything we do.
Right out of the gate this feature is available to all OpenDNS Enterprise customers, but later this year will be available in Deluxe as an add-on.
Michael Dragone
When will this show up in the dashboard for Enterprise customers?
posted on February 16th, 2010 at 1:14 pm
Allison Rhodes
@Michael – all you need to do is email your sales rep and have him/her enable it for you.
posted on February 16th, 2010 at 1:28 pm
John Waller
When will be available for Deluxe?
A date would be nice.
posted on February 17th, 2010 at 8:10 am
David Ulevitch, Founder/CEO
@John Waller
I don’t have a date for you, but I’ll tell you why we haven’t rolled it out yet.
First, since we’re proxying the blocked content in order to make it available through the bypass system it costs us money in the form of bandwidth and CPU, and we need to figure out if that’s a cost (1) we can eat and offer for free, (2) if it’s a cost we can offer for free up to a certain usage level or (3) if it’s a cost we need to pass down to our customers.
Second, we need to make sure this system scales like we’ve designed it to. It’s new technology and I’m a fan of launching things early and often (so long as they actually work) but that also means we are doing a controlled roll-out.
As we get feedback from customers and understand the usage patterns we will be making improvements and figuring out how to get it in front of all our customers.
Thanks,
David
posted on February 17th, 2010 at 11:47 am
Mark Mathson
Does this give the ability to track stats on individuals, granularly, as opposed to the whole network?
posted on February 22nd, 2010 at 7:57 am
Jonathan
I’d be happy to be a beta tester for you on this.
posted on February 22nd, 2010 at 8:28 am
Kim White
According to the OpenDNS product comparison it is available for Deluxe users, I assume this is in error?
posted on February 22nd, 2010 at 10:12 pm
O
I am also interested in seeing this available for Deluxe users.
posted on March 2nd, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Mark Mathson
How does this work, is it username password based, or is it based of an LDAP directory?
posted on March 4th, 2010 at 9:12 am
Memoona
how we unblocked that web site; while it is blocked by someone. we want to work on facebook.com
posted on March 9th, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Jestep
We’re waiting to upgrade specifically for this feature. In the meantime, is the best method of allowing some users to access unfiltered content to continue to bypass opendns dns servers?
posted on March 11th, 2010 at 8:12 am
mark d moncino, md faap
As a father and a pediatrician, I recommend OpenDNS for families. Yet, the INability to allow various levels of access to family members (adults vs kids) is the MOST severely limiting aspect of this service
With as easy as the service is to set up, the low cost (even for the deluxe option) and the success at limiting access at the parents discretion, charging $10-$40 a year (and maybe more) would be easily justified IF further customization could occur for the home user
mark
posted on March 14th, 2010 at 2:29 am
DJDB
I’d be really disappointed if you ask for an extra fee for that feature. Many Opendns deluxe users (including myself) have upgraded to Deluxe version only to have that bypass feature. If you ask for an extra fee, it will be really disappointing.
I don’t care about the 10 dollars or the money for an extra fee. I care about how i can trust Opendns when no one told me that i will have to pay an extra fee for the feature i need.
I’m sticking with Opendns for now, until the bypass feature is officially announced for Deluxe users. If there is an extra fee, i’ll start using Google Public DNS and look for a parental control software, as the one i have pre-paid for (bypass on Opendns) will need extra money to work.
posted on April 11th, 2010 at 8:17 am
David
It’s been 2 months since David Ulevitch commented on the Block Page Bypass for Deluxe users. Could we have an update please?
Thanks
David
posted on April 12th, 2010 at 4:09 am
JR
Oh, I’d love an update on this as well. I have recently run into several pages that were blocked as “Nudity” such as americanapparel.net. Probably tagged that way by religious fundamentalists because there’s a “Lingerie” section. Regardless, I’d like the ability to unblock stuff on the fly so I don’t have to constantly go in and add/remove things to the whitelist, especially since we’re limited on white/blacklist entries. :/
posted on April 26th, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Aron
any updates??? i am also waiting to upgrade to deluxe until the bypass feature is added. i dont need any other features from deluxe except this. any news on time line yet?
posted on May 11th, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Kevin
When will Block page bypass be available for OpenDNS Deluxe?
posted on August 5th, 2010 at 4:17 am
PeterVG
Same here, we’re waiting for the bypass feature to be available before we upgrade to the deluxe version. Please give us a date, cause we’ve been waiting for this a long time already… Please ?
posted on August 7th, 2010 at 11:37 pm
GCM
Sorry to bump this, but does anyone know if the bypass feature is available for OpenDNS Deluxe yet and if so, what is the extra cost?
Thanks!
posted on August 10th, 2010 at 8:23 pm