We’ve been hearing some pretty exciting stories from our customers lately and (though we’d love to share them all with you) we’ve selected some of the most interesting to showcase right here on the blog. We’ll be sharing these unique use cases of OpenDNS Enterprise with you over the next few months in a new series we’re calling Field Reports.

We couldn’t wait to share the story of Shafer’s Tours, which flexibly accommodates custom charters and tours for nearly-endless East Coast and Mid-Atlantic destinations. Operating more than a dozen luxury motor coaches, and serving a wide variety of groups that charter the buses and join the tours, the Safer’s Tours IT team was faced with an interesting challenge: How do you secure the Wi-Fi hotspot on a moving target? The team exhausted countless ideas for how they could conserve precious bandwidth onboard the buses, and prevent malware from being downloaded over the network, but they continued to encounter the same two issues: Installing appliances on every bus is cost prohibitive, and no adjustments or monitoring could be made to the network while the buses were in motion.

As luck would have it, Tim Watson, IT manager and safety director for Shafer’s Tours, was separately evaluating OpenDNS Enterprise for use on Shafer’s Tours corporate network. He quickly realized that the unique way OpenDNS Enterprise handles content filtering and malware protection makes it the ideal solution for securing his moving targets, too. In no time, his team was able to set up OpenDNS on both Shafer’s Tours’ corporate network and the individual WI-Fi hotspots for the buses without installing any appliances or provisioning any software. And, because OpenDNS Enterprise settings can be changed remotely, and updates are delivered in real-time in the cloud, they don’t have to worry about waiting for buses to return to home base to make changes.

Since setting up OpenDNS Enterprise, the Shafer Tours IT team hasn’t looked back. But don’t take our word for it. The Shafer’s Tours IT team tells us, “OpenDNS Enterprise is the only service that makes sense.” You can read more about how Shafer’s Tours is using OpenDNS here.

If your company is using OpenDNS Enterprise to solve an interesting problem, give us a shout at Success@OpenDNS.com. We’d love to share it right here.

Last week I traveled to Oregon for an annual event that brings together CIOs from colleges and universities around the country. I gave a talk about network security, specifically on blocking malware at the DNS level. Standing before a packed house, I first asked the crowd: “How many of you have heard of OpenDNS?” Roughly 75% of the audience raised their hands. Not bad. Next: “How many of you are using OpenDNS today?” A solid half put their hands in the air. That was powerful. On the one hand, I’d never met any of the people in the audience, but 3/4 of them had heard of us and 1/2 were using the service today. On the other hand, it meant that half the room either hadn’t heard of us, or wasn’t convinced they should be using us… yet.

I tell the above story to illustrate the way OpenDNS has grown — by building a great product, listening to customers, and having our customers tell their friends and colleagues.

OpenDNS will celebrate its fifth anniversary this year. We’ve come a long way, and it’s largely thanks to you. Today 1 in 3 public K-12 schools in the US is using OpenDNS (with over 40,000 schools using us world-wide.). And so are more than 20 million people in homes and businesses, from small mom and pop shops to Fortune 100 companies with offices and stores all over the world.

Every day we see people spreading the word about OpenDNS. Whether it’s simply through our tell-a-friend email, a post on their Facebook wall or a presentation at a community center, school, church or company.

I want to do more to support those of you who speak about OpenDNS, so here’s the deal:

If you’re part of a user group, or have an event where you’d like to give a presentation about OpenDNS, we want to support you. Email success at opendns dot com and tell us about your user group or presentation. We will send you presentation materials and mail out a bunch of stickers to hand out. If it makes sense, we will help reimburse you for snacks and sodas and even send you some free OpenDNS clothing to give away.

Hopefully this helps all those who speak about OpenDNS on our behalf. We’re thankful for it, and we want to help you in any way we can.

We pride ourselves at OpenDNS on listening to your ideas, feedback and suggestions. After all, much of our success can be attributed to users like you telling your friends about us, setting up OpenDNS on your family member’s routers and suggesting OpenDNS to network admins at your work. The Support Center and Idea Bank are two places where we take feedback about how we’re doing, but we know we can do more to listen to the people who use our service every day.

That’s why we’ve launched a new quarterly online survey. Some of you may have seen an invitation in the past day or two to participate in a brief questionnaire. The four-question survey is a way for us to measure how we’re doing in our goal of providing you with the best DNS service on the planet.

With your feedback, we’ll identify the places we’re doing well — and work on making them even better — and we’ll also take a critical look at which areas you think we may not be performing in quite as well. We’ll be surveying a different group of OpenDNS users every quarter, so keep your eyes open for an invite in your email. Looking forward to hearing your feedback!

When we look back at 2010, one of the things we’ll remember is how ubiquitous social became online. Facebook exploded, Twitter grew up, people “checked in”, and almost every website seemed to develop some sort of social component.

Not surprisingly, people using OpenDNS — parents, IT administrators, sysadmins, district technology heads — noticed the same thing. Data collected on how people used Web content filtering in 2010 shows this fact: Facebook is the #1 most blacklisted site. And interestingly enough, it’s also the #2 most whitelisted site. Other sites that were frequently blocked include MySpace and YouTube.

Not surprisingly, Facebook was also a frequent target of online scammers. When we analyzed submissions to Phishtank in 2010, we saw that Facebook was the second most frequent website targeted by phishing websites. The #1 target for 2010 — and throughout every month of the year — was PayPal. PayPal accounts for an incredible 45 percent of all online phishes.

These statistics and more can be found in a report we’re publishing today, all about the Web content filtering and phishing data we saw in 2010. I encourage you to download it and read through it. There’s some fascinating information included in the report, including which sites are the most frequent target of online scammers, how businesses are filtering content, and what categories people most frequently block on their networks.

You can download the full PDF report here: http://www.opendns.com/pdf/opendns-report-2010.pdf

Last night, millions of people across the eastern seaboard found themselves unable to go online and access the Internet. The culprit? A Comcast DNS outage that lasted more than three hours and affected customers from Boston to Baltimore. These kinds of attacks can hit anyone, including us. And it’s likely that if an attack was large enough to disrupt Comcast, it could be large enough to disrupt us. That’s scary.

When we launched introduced OpenDNS more than four years ago, our promise was this: the fastest, most reliable DNS service available. Since then we’ve added features and built out enhancements including malware protection, Web content filtering and SmartCache. That said, offering ultra-reliable DNS service is still at the core of what we do. This is part of the reason why we added a new datacenter in Singapore recently.

Over the past four+ years, we have been fortunate to have a perfect, 100 percent uptime record and we will work hard to maintain that. As we saw with Comcast last night, even great ISPs have outages when attacked with massive amounts of malicious traffic. This is why we will continue to add capacity, far in excess of what we actually need. The real solution to this is better security for end-users so they don’t get infected and become vehicles for DDoS attacks.

So, if you just got set up with OpenDNS last night, welcome! Hopefully last night was the last time you’ll ever be without Internet due to a DNS issue. We’ll work hard to make sure it was. If you’ve been set up with OpenDNS for a while now, you probably didn’t notice there was any issue at all.

Today we’re launching OpenDNS for Managed Service Providers. OpenDNS for Managed Service Providers allows MSPs of any size a co-branded version of our popular OpenDNS Enterprise service to their customers.

This service was created out of demand from two different audiences — first, we have had a large number of MSPs express interest in reselling our OpenDNS Enterprise service to their customers. Second, we have a number of businesses looking to purchase OpenDNS Enterprise but who aren’t looking to buy a large subscription (which is what our corporate sales team focuses on). As a result, we now have a fully-integrated program for MSPs and a solution for our customers looking for a smaller or more tailored offering while still getting all of the OpenDNS Enterprise features.

We hear all the time that existing appliance-based solutions are prohibitively expensive and require site visits to install and often to manage. This isn’t ideal for the MSPs or for the clients. We believe OpenDNS is now serving a critical need of IT solutions providers around the world with the advent of OpenDNS for Managed Service Providers.

As a cloud-based service with a significantly lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than alternative security services, OpenDNS Enterprise helps MSPs lower overhead costs and time spent on-site at client locations, while giving their customers something they’ve been looking for — comprehensive Web content filtering, faster Internet, and phishing and Malware protection. OpenDNS Enterprise’s unique malware and botnet protection technology is unlike anything else available, providing a significant differentiator IT solutions providers can pass on to their clients.

Finally, I want to provide a big thank you to the dozens of MSPs who have been testing this with us over the last 3-4 months as we made refinements to both the dashboard interfaces and the program itself. We’re confident we have created a program that works well for all MSPs and are excited to make sure the program is a huge success.

More information about the OpenDNS for Managed Service Providers program is available here. Interested MSPs can apply to join the program today!

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of OpenDNS Enterprise. It was exactly one year ago today we made the service available, not knowing how it would be received, but confident in the vision behind it. It has been a tremendous success.

In one year, nearly 1,000 enterprises have switched to OpenDNS Enterprise, and in many cases, away from costly appliance-based security solutions from folks like Blue Coat and Websense. Our customers include several Fortune 100 organizations, global iconic brands you love, and hundreds more that are globally distributed.

For those who do not know — OpenDNS Enterprise provides a cost-effective and efficient way to manage Internet access and security across multiple physical locations, easily deployed and managed over the Web. With the availability of OpenDNS Enterprise, it is no longer necessary to purchase and maintain stodgy and costly filtering appliances at each of your sites.

While we were excited about what we built, the proof of our success is in the numbers:
The renewal rate among OpenDNS Enterprise customers for the next subscription year is an unprecedented 98 percent. Further, many OpenDNS Enterprise customers are subscribing to the service with multiple-year contracts (and saving money by doing so).

We have made great strides with OpenDNS Enterprise but we have barely scratched the surface of what we intend to deliver to customers. I’ve been reviewing our roadmap for 2011 and can confidently say that I have never been more excited about the opportunity we have at OpenDNS to deliver a fantastic service to our customers.

I feel privileged to work at OpenDNS and I feel honored that so many great companies have chosen to do business with us. I also wanted to thank our 20,000,000+ users who provide us so much wonderful feedback. In fact, almost every OpenDNS Enterprise customer had used OpenDNS at home before bringing it to work!

It’s been almost a year since I took back over as CEO of the company I founded in 2005 and in this last year I have assembled a world-class management team who are helping to scale and grow our business on all fronts — enterprise, consumer and more. We’re also hiring great people, so please consider applying if you can help us take our vision of a safe and secure Internet to the next level.

PS: This post is about Enterprise, but I wanted to mention that we have great stuff coming out for our OpenDNS Basic service in 2011. More on that later…

Today we’re launching a new recurring feature on the OpenDNS blog, “Five Questions with an OpenDNS User.” Longtime readers of the OpenDNS blog may remember a similar feature from a few years back. Let us know in the comments what you think, or shoot me an email if you’d like to be the next featured OpenDNS user.

Genesis Career College is a seven-campus vocational school in the southeast U.S. The man in charge of keeping students and staff safely and securely connected is Director of Technology Robert Warren. Below, he answers five quick questions:

How long have you been working at Genesis?
I have worked with Genesis Career Group for a little over two years. Great company to work for. Very innovative in the higher education field as we are expanding into online education and want to offer a vast array of cloud-based services to our students.

How did you find your way into IT?
A friend of mine gave me an old Compaq PC back in 1996 I believe. It had Windows 95, 128 megs of memory and something like a 400 or 500 MHz CPU. Pretty much a door stop today. I played with that PC, upgrading hardware and Windows, until one day I literally blew it up. I added a new CD drive, hit the power button and the power supply literally popped and then the dreaded smoke. I quickly learned the phrase “let the smoke out.”

I had realized at that point what I really wanted to do so I built another PC from scratch, took some courses and the rest is history as they say. From then to now has been an exciting path with constant learning, which never stops. I love IT and am very passionate about what I do. It is great to have a career you love and can make a good living in.

What problems were you seeking to solve with OpenDNS?
We wanted an effective yet easy to manage and deploy solution to stop the general time wasting by employees and students on non-business related websites. We also wanted to have added protection from phishing and malware sites. We looked at hardware solutions but due to the geographical nature of our company that was too costly. We chose OpenDNS because of the cost (obviously), simplicity and great functionality of the service.

Favorite gadget or tech toy?
My phone. The new Android powered phones are great devices. I am not a big Apple fan and I think the Android phones will definitely give the iPhone a big headache! Google rocks!

If someone was going to take a look at your Web surfing habits, what are your top five time-wasting Web sites?
Hummm… well first would be Facebook, chatting with friends and family. Then would probably have to be (as of recently) BP’s website following the progress in the Gulf. Then I would have to say IT related stuff (I know pretty stereotypical, I guess I am kind of geeky). I like to read online articles, check out new products and of course stay up on the latest mobile devices. I like to hack my phones and my Droid is a pretty awesome device.