It’s a story we’ve heard time and again. Public school budgets are smaller than ever, and the funds devoted to improving technology (and security) get cut in half, and then cut in half again. Network administrators at schools are forced to piece together legacy hardware and out-of-date software with some clever work-arounds in order to keep kids protected from malware, phishing and unsafe content.

Unfortunately, this often results in security loopholes and inconsistent filtering policies for kids (who are usually tech smart enough to figure out how to get around them) and a whole heck of a lot of work for network administrators.

OpenDNS is changing all that. With OpenDNS, schools can can turn filtering and malware protection into cost-savings initiatives instead of cost centers, and they can ensure that protection is universal across an unlimited number of locations. And this isn’t just speculation on our part – we shared a new milestone this morning that proves it’s reality. We announced that 90 percent of public K-12 schools in Maine are using OpenDNS. For us, it’s a huge honor and privilege to be given the responsibility of protecting nearly every kid in Maine. But for the state of Maine, it’s a lot more.

We tip our hat to Maine for being on the cutting-edge of technological innovation, lifting the burden of appliance management and limiting the dangers of security loopholes. And we send a very big congratulations to the team at Networkmaine, the organization that operates and maintains all network infrastructure for Maine’s K-12 schools and libraries, who identified that using OpenDNS would not only allow the state of Maine to significantly improve the security it uses to protect kids, but that universal deployment would put them at the forefront of keeping kids safe online.

Last year we announced that 1 in 3 public K-12 schools in the U.S. were using OpenDNS, and although we celebrated the milestone, we went to work right away to make OpenDNS the choice of all schools. We added the academic fraud category for content filtering and created the K-12 forums in our community section. And we’re not done yet. If you have ideas for how to make OpenDNS better for schools, tell us what you need. David and our engineers are closely monitoring the IdeaBank, where you can share suggestions for product improvements, and we’re always listening at Success@OpenDNS.com.

Today we announced that Shea Homes, the largest privately-held homebuilder in the U.S. has deployed and is experiencing great success with OpenDNS Enterprise. J.F. Shea Co., its parent company, is also using OpenDNS Enterprise. For us, its hugely exciting that the company America trusts to build our homes and engineering marvels has trusted OpenDNS Enterprise with the task of protecting its networks and employees from malware and unsafe content.

It’s no easy task to be one of the nation’s largest and most respected homebuilders and civil contractors. Aside from a strong commitment to excellence and customer satisfaction, and building global landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam, it also means a constant and significant amount of corporate growth. For Shea Homes and parent company J.F. Shea Co, keeping up with that rapid growth meant purchasing, deploying and managing new malware protection and content filtering appliances for its various networks every time a new office was added, or more bandwidth was needed. The company and its subsidiary were stuck in an ugly cycle of appliance management, a story that’s all too familiar for many rapidly growing organizations. But escaping the cycle was not only easy, it resulted in significant savings of both time and resources.

The J.F. Shea Co. and its divisions were early adopters of cloud-based services like OpenDNS Enterprise because the move let the companies free up significant IT budget and time, and downsize datacenters across their distributed locations. This was especially significant during the economic downturn that left the building industry particularly hard hit. Notably, J.F. Shea Co.’s cloud-based evolution was rooted in the transition to OpenDNS Enterprise. Shea Homes soon followed by adopting OpenDNS Enterprise for all of its North Carolina locations. The organizations not only leverage OpenDNS Enterprise for its unique ability to block malware and botnets at the DNS level, but also for the added protection the organizations receive by filtering malicious sites that are frequently the sources of such malware.

Using OpenDNS Enterprise afforded J.F. Shea Co. a savings of more than $25,000 and gave Shea Homes the ability to downsize its datacenters and let its IT team focus more closely on proactive maintenance. We’re excited to say that OpenDNS Enterprise does this each day for companies large and small. And we love spreading those stories, helping other SysAdmins around the world learn how OpenDNS Enterprise can do the same for them. If you have questions about OpenDNS Enterprise, or want to learn how it can help your business stay safe from malware or inappropriate content, join our webinar next Wednesday, Oct. 26.

If you’re using OpenDNS at work and want to share your success story, email Success@OpenDNS.com.

We love hearing stories from our users about how they’re using OpenDNS, so much in fact, that we frequently ask our Facebook friends and Twitter followers to tell us about their experiences. And when Dustin Springman, network director for the South Georgia Regional Information Technology Authority (SGRITA), recently told us a story, we thought it was so humbling and inspiring we just had to share it with you.

It’s no secret that we think OpenDNS has the absolute best users of any security company out there. And, that while we work hard to spread the word, it’s the users themselves who are our best ambassadors. But Dustin has taken it to the next level. Working with SGRITA, Dustin has universally deployed OpenDNS across networks that serve more than 15,000 people.

After dealing with the unreliable DNS offered by his local ISP for too long, Dustin set up OpenDNS and never looked back. He loved the service so much that he began sharing his success with friends and neighbors, even going the extra mile to set it up on their machines.

But his passion for OpenDNS didn’t stop there. At the time OpenDNS announced it was offering a cloud-based content filtering solution, Dustin was working for SGRITA and advising many K-12 schools on Web security. He quickly realized the dramatic impact OpenDNS could have on K-12 schools that face limited IT resources yet still need to meet CIPA compliance. Springman educated local school districts on the benefits of using OpenDNS and deployed the service universally across all of the school networks SGRITA managed.

When we announced OpenDNS Enterprise to protect businesses from malware, Dustin once again sensed that OpenDNS was reading his mind. SGRITA was troubleshooting an alarming amount of malware and botnet activity for the business networks it served, and he knew DNS level malware prevention was a unique solution. Dustin advocated that all the business networks SGRITA served explore and institute OpenDNS to cure their malware woes.

Today Dustin is an active participant in the OpenDNS community: Tagging domains in the Domain Tagging system and helping make OpenDNS Web content filtering more effective, submitting ideas in IdeaBank about ways OpenDNS can be even better and more feature-rich, helping other users by answering questions in the Forums. Plus, he’s following Facebook and Twitter for the latest updates and ensuring OpenDNS is set up on all the networks SGRITA manages.

And we know that there are thousands more OpenDNS users just like Dustin. So to all of you who have convinced your CTO to deploy OpenDNS across your company’s network, educated your local school board on OpenDNS so your kid was as safe at school as she is under your roof, or simply installed OpenDNS for your parents, we say: Thanks a million. We hope that as we continue to add features and products that will benefit your colleagues, friends or community you’ll help us spread the word and create a safer Internet for everyone.

Give us the chance to thank you for spreading the word on OpenDNS: Email your story to success@OpenDNS.com.

Nope, that’s not a typo in the headline, we had our best week ever, for the last two weeks running. It’s a great pleasure to run a company that has grown consistently since its inception five years ago. Being able to watch important metrics climb up and to the right is a joy not all companies are afforded, and we don’t take this success for granted. We’re focused on innovation and improving the status quo when it comes to DNS and security — we owe it to each of you.

In our kitchen we have a KPI (key performance indicators) dashboard that every employee at OpenDNS can see. It covers an array of important metrics that provide critical insight into the health of our business even including our day to day financials. I’ve always run OpenDNS with a keen focus on numbers and I believe we can run the best company by sharing the numbers widely. Being able to see the numbers causes everyone to think about their contribution to the metrics that matter and how they can have a positive impact on the company (less support requests, improved performance, better traffic engineering, etc.) I believe looking at the numbers can guide a business unfailingly — Numbers don’t lie (though their interpretation is often a good fodder for debate!).

Today I’m delighted to report some exceptional numbers. OpenDNS has recorded its two biggest weeks on record. We are now regularly handing over 32 billion requests per day during the week (some of you seem to take a break on weekends). Best of all we’ve done this with zero downtime, as we’ve never had downtime in our entire company history.

I believe in our mission unwaveringly of making the Internet safer, faster and more reliable. And I can’t thank our users enough for their support of that mission. Also can’t wait to share more the cool stuff we’re cooking up.

PS — Some of you have already asked me about what we’re using for our KPI dashboard. We built it ourselves and I’m going to suggest the engineer who created it write a post about how it works.

For the past several months Christian Kreibich and Nicholas Weaver over at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, have been tracking a laundry list of ISPs to confirm what they thought to be true: that the ISPs are intercepting customers’ search queries and surreptitiously redirecting them to advertiser or affiliate links. What’s being alleged is that when the ISP customer types something into his or her own browser address bar, instead of making a DNS request or sending the traffic to the browser-configured search provider, the ISP decides which page the customer is taken to and just sends them there. Last week New Scientist magazine broke the story about the findings and caused a stir across the Internet, which has also prompted Congress to take a look, potentially calling some of these ISPs and bad actors in front of the new Congressional Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law.

Keyword redirection is something new we’ve not seen before, and it’s particularly pernicious, but the practice of ISPs somehow trying to shake more nickels out of their customers is certainly not new. It’s happened before here and here. There are some technical similarities to what we do and what these ISPs are doing, though our methods and motives could not be more different. One of the most important differences relates to choice — everyone chooses to use OpenDNS but most people, if they are lucky enough to have access to broadband at all, only have one choice of ISP.

Our goal at OpenDNS is to help protect people from exactly this kind of security and privacy violation, be it from a malicious hacker or even your ISP. In fact, one of the great ironies in this saga is that while we have never done the things the ISPs are being accused of, we did pioneer some of the techniques that ISPs are using to accomplish this redirection. That doesn’t make us very happy.

Everything we do at OpenDNS has been with our users’ best interests in mind. We’ve always operated an opt-in service with the sole aim of making you thrilled about using it. Using OpenDNS provides you a healthy level of insulation and privacy between you and your ISP. In the case of the newly-found keyword redirection, switching to OpenDNS empowers you to regain control over your address bar. With OpenDNS enabled, the ISP-controlled keyword redirection stops happening and your address bar searches go back to taking you where you want them to.

I fear the keyword redirection the ISPs are being accused of doing is only the beginning, as we’re seeing more and more evidence of ISPs doing things (that most would agree) they shouldn’t be doing. Even if you use OpenDNS and the ISP keyword redirection fails, it’s unclear whether ISPs are still able to sniff your traffic and create a profile about your Internet use – a blatant privacy offense. The idea of anyone, including your ISP, spying on your traffic raises serious security and privacy concerns.  We fully intend to follow this closely and continue to help you do something about it.

You can be sure we will respond by delivering even stronger solutions that protect your security, privacy and ability to use the Internet unencumbered anywhere in the world, on any device, at any time.

It’s SysAdmin Appreciation Day and we’re celebrating by crowning our 2011 SysAdmin of the Year and worthy winners in six other categories. The nominations poured in and we challenged a talented panel of OpenDNS engineers and SysAdmins to determine the winners. After an arduous deliberation process (involving multiple energy drinks and trips to the snack room) our team chose John Cannon, lone IT pro for a rapidly expanding group of BMW and Mercedes dealerships, as the 2011 SysAdmin of the Year! John was nominated for the Neat Freak category but his before and after pictures told of a patient and organized SysAdmin simultaneously managing IT for five locations while implementing a massive and challenging overhaul.

John joins an elite group of winners who raised the bar for each of the categories below:

Best Disaster Response Award
After Hurricane Ike struck, Hart Energy’s servers were trapped in an area without power and nearly impossible to access through the debris and downed power lines. Mark Chiles wins the Disaster Response Award for his heroic actions to save the servers, including blindly descending ten flights of stairs in pitch-black darkness and using his own body to save a server after nearly falling down the staircase!

Shoestring Budget Award
James Gamble and Brian Albury might work at a children’s museum but when it comes to saving money, they’re not kidding around. They receive this year’s Shoestring Budget Award for their uncompromising commitment to saving the non-profit museum hundreds of thousands of dollars each year by repurposing old machines, using open source and free software, and standardizing company practices, all while leveraging a limited budget that is funded by grants and donations.

Flying Solo Award
Eric Szymczyk is a one-man IT show at a large public relations firm in Boston. Eric spent two highly-caffeinated days moving his entire firm into new offices, including the deployment of new laptops for all employees! He singlehandedly moved the servers, racks, cables, phone system, scanners, printers and more while somehow managing to save the company thousands in the process. We’re in awe of this work, but we still think he humbly tells it best: “I have been a light bulb replacer, a surge protector switcher-on guy, a virus fixer, a heavy box delivery man, a server installer, an iPhone troubleshooter, a network architect and more… my name is Eric, I am IT, and I fly solo.”

Large-Scale Deployment Award
Ryan Pierce was the stand-out winner for the large-scale deployment award because faced the difficult challenge of implementing a system-wide upgrade across dozens of healthcare facilities throughout California. He did so with limited support resources, an executive team that didn’t see value in an IT department, and the responsibility of simultaneously handling all IT tickets for the organization! Now, he boasts the trust and support of the executive team, HIPAA compliance, and the successful completion of a $1.5M upgrade.

DevOps Award
This was an easy one. Elite SysAdmin and engineer Richard Crowley cut his teeth at OpenDNS, where he learned a massive amount about operations and systems. We couldn’t be more proud of his new tool and venture, blueprint, and Richard couldn’t be more deserving of this award. Blueprint allows users to reverse-engineer running servers, output a blueprint, and recreate the server. The tool has already helped numerous SysAdmins quickly take existing machines and add them to automation frameworks. Plus, it’s completely open source, free, and available at Github.com, where more than 800 people are following its progress. A perfect fit for the DevOps award.

Neat Freak Award
If this year’s nominations are any indication of industry standards, it appears that the freakishly neat are multiplying! From the countless nominations we received there was one clear standout. Thanks to David Korté’s painstaking network diagramming, his server racks look like a work of art.

Our amazing list of winners will receive a bounty of gifts fit for a SysAdmin. Their prize package includes caffeinated treats from ThinkGeek, OpenDNS swag, and perhaps most importantly, bragging rights to their friends and colleagues.

Thank you to everyone who entered and raised the bar for the 2011 OpenDNS SysAdmin Awards.

Five years of OpenDNS. We’ve come so far and have much to be thankful for.

In 2005, before launching OpenDNS, I went to talk with some of the leading DNS experts to get feedback — and the feedback I received was consistent. They didn’t think what I wanted to do was even possible, and if it was possible, they didn’t think anybody would want it. Smart guys, but wrong on both counts.

Today, we are the largest DNS service in the world with more than 30,000,000 users. 30,000,000! And we’ve never had a global outage. If we were an ISP, we’d be one of the largest in the world.

We compete against Google, which launched a service following ours in 2009. And we’re winning. We compete against Symantec, a $14 billion dollar company that has watched us build market-share with consumer and enterprise customers who prefer OpenDNS as a security solution. And we make the Internet safer, faster and more reliable for more than 1% of the world’s Internet users.

We’ve done this with your help, your feedback, your evangelism, and your encouragement. And that’s why we thank you, and make sure to put you first with everything we do.

Some Major Milestones:

• In July 2006, we opened our doors and let in the first packets, within a month, we handled a total of over 1 billion DNS queries. Today we handle over 30 billion a day.
• In April of 2009, not quite 3 years after our launch, we handled 10 billion queries in a single day. We are supersonic at this point!
• In the summer of 2009 — skipping our vacation — we pushed our mission of a safer, faster Internet for everyone forward with our good friends at NETGEAR to deliver Live Parental Controls and OpenDNS across millions of households.
• 2009 ended with the launch of OpenDNS Enterprise, our service to deliver a safer Internet to businesses small and large around the world. Today we have some of the largest companies in the world on our enterprise platform.
• In June of 2010 we discovered that 1 out of 3 public schools in the US was using OpenDNS to provide a safer and faster Internet to students across America. Today, we see over 40,000 schools around the world!
• July 2011 welcomes our fifth birthday and our announcement that we now have more than 30,000,000 people using OpenDNS every day. And based on our numbers, the countdown to 40,000,000 isn’t far away.

The Road Ahead

We’re a startup and we move fast. It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture when you’re heads-down, focused on an immediate product launch or set of features. In order to make sure we stay on course, we have a few perspectives shaping the decisions we make.

• Speed and reliability matter more than ever. The number of people connected to the Internet around the world continues to grow at an astounding rate and the desire to access content quickly, safely and securely has only increased.
• We look at the major security companies like Symantec, Websense, Blue Coat and others and see major gaps in their offerings and we think there is a better way to secure the myriad devices connecting to our customers’ networks.
• We know that despite tons of various malware solutions in the market, they all stink for one reason or another.
• We know that people care about privacy, but if you ask 100 people to explain what privacy means you will get 100 different answers.
• We know there are a lot of different devices connecting to the Internet now and having custom software deployed for each version of Android, iOS, Windows or Mac is unmanageable.
• We believe in defense in depth as the only sound security strategy and we want to help our customers practice it. We are sympathetic to the CIO who doesn’t want ten different security solutions on his or her network, but history has shown that the magical security appliance that does everything will let you down every time.

Thank You

OpenDNS is poised for even more stratospheric growth in the next five years. As a company, we are becoming more mature in our thinking, and our goals continue to expand. With each hill we climb, the horizon of our potential positive impact continues to broaden.

As an engineering-driven company, we’re lucky to have assembled such an amazing engineering organization that delivers our non-stop service. We have consistently recruited amazing people, and managed to raise the already-high bar with every new hire.

I speak for everyone on the team here when I say: Thank you for using OpenDNS!

PS, we’re running an amazing infographic of OpenDNS statistics on our homepage for a couple days, but here’s a link to it in case you miss it.

At OpenDNS, we think the SysAdmins and IT pros are the real unsung heroes. Even though you spend every day quietly averting disaster and keeping the network up and running, it’s not often you get the recognition you deserve. As you’ve probably learned from recent blog posts, the OpenDNS offices have been buzzing with projects meant to help us, and people around the world, celebrate SysAdmins.

We’re making it our priority for the entire month of July to celebrate SysAdmins everywhere! That’s why we’re not only throwing an epic bash in downtown San Francisco to celebrate SysAdmins, we’re also reminding bosses that come July 29 you deserve some special (and preferably caffeinated) recognition.

How the OpenDNS Boss Reminder Service works: Sending your boss a reminder is easy and they’ll never know you were the one who tipped us off. Simply fill out the form with your details and your boss’ name and email* and we’ll take care of the rest. A few days before the July 29 holiday your boss will receive an email that looks like this:

*Don’t worry. We won’t email you or your boss for anything except the friendly reminder service.