IoT Insider Podcast | Episode 12: Under the hood with Pangea Protect, our new mobile content filtering solution

Dan Cunliffe
Hi everybody, my name is Dan Cunliffe, and welcome to our podcast where today we’re talking about a new service, a new product that we’ve just recently launched, Content Filtering, at network level on our SIM cards. The world’s becoming more and more mobile day by day and the events this year, particularly have doubled the already massive need for connectivity, as well as the need for digital integrity. We know that from working at home, and having to change the way that we do things we’ve had to work in a very different way. But also, that means that we’ve opened ourselves up to possibly more, I suppose, frequent and possibly more dangerous digital attacks. But until now, the fixed line connections have had the lion’s share of security, scalable, flexible content filtering technology, but no longer we have brought out one that we can use on mobile. And our new mobile content filtering solution works on every connected solution that we provide already. So things like Multi-network, our On-demand Backup, our Rapid Deployment, our Pre-Ethernet, whatever it is, we can make it work for you. So today, I’m very delighted, as usual, to be joined by my Operations Director and co founder, Chris Romeika. Welcome.

Chris Romeika
Hello Dan. Thank you.

Dan Cunliffe
No problem. And Chris is going to help us look under under the hood, sort of understand what the content filtering can do, particularly because it is pretty interesting to deliver it at network level, and what it can kind of help people who are, you know, using traditional methods like maybe mobile device management, how can this be different to that, but also like, What can it do and what have we used it in the real life to try and actually bring services to the mobile environment, that mean, we can protect your staff, but maybe even sort of vulnerable people as well. So I’m gonna take you through a little bit about the features and kind of working through some of the points we’d like to discuss. And essentially, it’s a software solution that has a set of rules that will, that will block websites, will block certain types of activity that you as our customer can actually set up, and help us to, I suppose scope out what would work for your environment, and then effectively use it right across devices, like Mi-Fi’s, SIM enabled tablets, etc. And basically allowing the solution to be pretty powerful, rather than just being in the fixed environment. So let’s maybe go through some of these things Chris, I’m particularly starting with things like real time content analysis. So the idea about the platform is that you can see pretty much everything related to the URLs and the HTTP that you are wanting to filter and wanting to be looked through in real time. And we have an AI system, which we’ll be looking at this automatically. So your organisation doesn’t need to be doing this yourself. But you can be staying compliant, for example, like government office, or anyone else that needs to have these things in place. Chris you may want to talk a little bit about some of the features that are in real time. I know you’ve worked closely with it, and the things you can see kind of regularly.

Chris Romeika
Yeah, so the content filter is part of a larger system, which has access to a lot of traffic usage and statistics and website requests actually on a worldwide basis. So as you can imagine, there’s literally hundreds of 1000s of URLs being accessed like every second. And what the platform does, is that through sort of machine learning, artificial intelligence, it will build out like you know what type of category, that particular website is, you know, whether it’s porn or gambling, etc. It will categorise it. And then it just constantly updates our own local platform, which is installed on our network and our data centres around the UK. Once it starts classifying that traffic, whatever it is, based upon the rules that we define. So you know, it couldn’t be a rule to simply block porn or gambling, it could be a rule to only allow access to, you know, Google or Microsoft sites. could be any type of rules that will start to just classify that traffic. And, you know, it’s not a, it’s not a static filter. So we’re not sort of saying, here’s a list of URLs keep an eye out for them. We’re saying like, here’s a list of categories. And the URLs in that category are constantly being updated and change in real time, which means that the end user gets the best possible protection and filtering.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, exactly. And I think I think, just added to that, like, some of the key security features, which we’re going through is like, essentially, you can use it to block sites that are trying to attack you as well. It’s almost like a host IP type scenario. I mean, this is pretty important. Because, you know, we know that every day, there are more and more attacks, happening on devices, trying to essentially phishing with a ph, you know, trying to get through into taking information from these devices, either through a web based virus, or some sort of malware, where we can actually block those sort of things as well. Right?

Chris Romeika
Yeah. So you know, basically works on, you know, any type of HTTP or HTTPS requests, or web requests or secure web requests, a lot of apps on your phone also use that as well. So it’s not just limited to just what’s happening through the web browser. You know, a lot of apps use HTTPS, from an API type of perspective to get traffic. And these days loading up a website, like almost any site, it’s not just, you know, getting a page of text from a server, like, literally hundreds of elements in the site are coming from all over the internet, you know, once a site’s infected with malware or phishing type thing, or viruses, then, then you know, that’s when the dangerous so you can basically block parts of that, like, you know, you can do sort of like ad blocking, for example, or it will just block the entire site. So yeah, there’s multiple layers of security there.

Dan Cunliffe
And I think one of the one of the key features for me, is the fact that how much customisable options we have, sometimes it’s not good to have too many customisable options. But I think what we’ve experienced when we talk about some of the real life examples in a, in a moment, it’s really about creating, I suppose genres of protection, you know, things that particularly focus on, and it doesn’t always have to be very seedy conversations, it can be anything from extremism, to things like hate speech, you know, possibly even blocking out, as you mentioned earlier, something like ad blocking, you know, you can have that as a way to maybe optimise the amount of data you’ve bought for the service, you know, sometimes the ad blocking is just a bit of a nuisance, but it’s chowing your data, you know, it’s actually eating your data. So being able to customise and block unintended usage, is, I think, quite an interesting piece as well.

Chris Romeika
I guess the sort of the traditional view of content filtering is to is to block the seedy stuff, the dodgy stuff, all that type of thing. But, you know, from from an office perspective, we’ve got lots of customers who will just do something like, you know, fairly open policy to access things, but block, you know, your social media, and your streaming, for example, but open it up during lunchtime. Or for schools, you know, perhaps open it up after school or after work, you know, depending on the application is so time based things are very handy as well.

Dan Cunliffe
Well, let’s, let’s just talk a little bit about sort of how it works. And you know, who we’ve worked it for, so we’re talking a lot about network level filtering. So what we mean by that is basically saying that, actually, whatever the SIM is in, we’re blocking at that level. So as an example, we could use a Multi-network SIM, connect to all the networks in the UK, all the networks in Europe, even if we wanted to, and essentially use the little portable Wi-Fi device, the Mi-Fi as the kind of gateway if you want or the kind of place where we filter. And that means that you could have multiple devices, we don’t need to have a Mobile Device Management Service on them connecting through the Mi-Fi, and then being kind of protected from the internet. For me, that’s pretty interesting. And I guess what that also opens up is the ability to control devices that don’t necessarily have a simple interface, right? Like a router, like a Mi-Fi device. You know, how would you kind of say that that’s a benefit for people?

Chris Romeika
Yeah, I think it’s a it’s just a different type of filtering, which has many advantages over a per device filtering system. So, for example, your traditional thing like Mobile Device Management, installing a bit of software on a phone or a tablet, of course, you know, that will definitely protect the phone. But if you’ve got an office, you know, it’s more of an administrative effort to make sure every single device that’s on the office network, you know, a bunch of laptops, a bunch of phones, some tablets, you’d have to make sure that all of those things are are protected, you know, with in software on a per device basis. Software on a laptop, on the tablet etc. And then you’d also have to administer that. So, you know, make sure that other things can’t connect to the Wi-Fi network input will have an authentication method in place for the Wi-Fi, which is stricter to, to make sure only authorised devices are on. So the good thing about network filtering is that, you know, it is a catch all where, you know, we’re just covering everything because we’re looking at the SIM card, you know, in other words, kind of like the WAN link, the uplink really, and we’re filtering there, rather than pushing that filtering out to the individual device.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah. And that also gives you economies of less scale, well, maybe gives you economies of scale, because you only need one device to manage many others. And you know, people, especially, you know, at these times are always interested in something that can do maybe even a better job at at a better price, right? I mean, like, why not? I mean, it makes sense to this review that way. Okay, cool. And, you know, let’s, let’s have a look at some of the kind of features related to markets, like who would want to use this sort of stuff, you know, like, why do we as Pangea feel that we can launch this to our partners and out into the market. So we can probably reference a real world example today where Pangea were kind of selected, I suppose, by a public sector body through one of our partners to effectively support vulnerable children during COVID. So essentially, as all of us know, we’ve had to either do home schooling, or we’ve had to do work from home during lockdown, which has had many different types of challenges. But one of those challenges that we probably forget, is that some people who are vulnerable, or who don’t have, you know, essential broadband at home? How would they be able to do homeschooling? How would they be able to do elearning, you know, that becomes really challenging. And so the request came in to, to support that. And so what we’ve done is we’ve delivered a service, which is on our Multi-network SIM card, it connects to every network in the UK, but it now has Content Filtering at network level. So every one of these vulnerable people, more than likely children are able to connect to the Mi-Fi device, with with a laptop, for example. But we are protecting them and keeping them safe from various different types of malware, as well as you know, accessing sites that they probably shouldn’t be allowed to. And I think, Chris maybe there’s anything else we can add to it. But so far, it’s been going incredibly well, we’re able to do reports on pretty much everything from highest number of blocked services, all the way through to, you know, being able to tweak that service on the fly. A great example of that was that a lot of the devices needed to do updates on Microsoft. And we could adjust that very quickly. So maybe you want to add a bit to that real world example, if you’ve got anything else?

Chris Romeika
Yeah, the reporting capability is very, very powerful. So we can get reports in many different formats from like PDF to Excel to CSVs. And it’s really important with this type of platform to be able to drill down as much as possible. So from you know, literally hundreds of 1000s of SIM cards, we can drill down to like a single SIM card, or in other words, a single IP address, we can get a report over the last week, the last month, last year, about every single URL visited or maybe you know, a list of how many sites were blocked, how many sites are allowed through, you know, and do that, for a SIM, a group of SIMs or an entire customer, what that allows the customer to do is to just get a really good profile of the type of traffic that that, you know, that their end users are looking at. So a good example was, yeah, you know, it was like a large amount of data usage. And, you know, it didn’t seem to be required. But then we realised that, you know, a bunch of Windows Updates were, were happening at the same time, or we’ve also seen things where, where the PlayStation Store releases some new game, or a massive new updates for a game. And just for that day, or that couple of days, we see, you know, a spike in data usage. Yeah. So it’s very interesting. And it gives us and the customer insights into, you know, into what the user base is doing, what type of traffic makes up their user base. And sometimes there are surprises in there as well.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah. And I think traditionally, that’s been quite difficult to access, you know, that level of granularity on mobile. Unless you’ve got some exceptionally high and costly devices in your network, it’s not easy to just pull that information out. Whereas on the fixed services, it’s been quite as simple thing to do back in the day.

Chris Romeika
Yep, that’s right. Yeah. I mean, truthfully, you know, you’d have something like deep packet inspection, or a system but you know, it, you know, it’s one hand to set up the system, but then it’s another hand to actually maintain that system and get the most information out of it, which is why, you know, the system that we’ve built is is very good in that respect, to keep getting, you know, useful information, because it’s one thing just to sort of see some stats, but it’s another thing to actually act on it and you know, how And get more revenue from, you know, increasing data plans or showing customers why they might need to might need more data. Less data. You know, we can make use out of the information that we get, which is very handy.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah. And I think if we sort of move it on into some of the other markets, I think we spoke about education. So what schools I mean, I think every single school today, at the actual physical school has some level of content filtering, I think it’s almost a prerequisite right to have that when they’re sitting in the classroom accessing Wi-Fi in the classroom. But one of the things that we were thinking about is, when you look at the backup service, being able to now offer that on your backup mobile service, that should be a really interesting play as well, being able to actually offer a 4G backup service, which is completely separate to the fixed infrastructure, have that on Content Filtering as well, is something that’s not really been out there. So we’re quite keen on how we move that forward. But if we start thinking a little bit about the government offices, or kind of the government services, we’re very keen to work with, I suppose people who are in the public sector around, you know, hospitals, doctors, surgeries, maybe even mobile doctors surgeries, like we have to today, we’re doing several things around breast screening, we did a press release on the Nightingale hospital that we set up for COVID. I think if we’re going to use mobile technology to access sites quicker or in remote locations, Content Filtering, particularly in a public sector, environment has to be a standard, I don’t think you can essentially put something in to a public environment, whether it’s Wi-Fi, or just sending data, personal data for people’s health information, if you’re not using the service. So that’s something I think could definitely be an interesting market as well. I don’t know, if you have anything to add on that, you know, using it in a very different environment.

Chris Romeika
Yeah, I mean, our platform also, you know, it adheres to a lot of standards and guidelines set out by the government. So for example, there’s the government has things like sort of lists of terrorist sites or questionable content, you know, one of them might be the IWF, Internet Watch Foundation. Another one is something called I think it was called the Safer Schools Initiative or something like that from education perspective. So, so our platform, you know, conforms with all of those guidelines, you know, as we see, as it’s required.

Dan Cunliffe
And what we’re trying to say to our partners, really is that by launching this product, it’s as simple as a bit of an understanding of what you really need are the markets you’re talking to, and then it becomes an add on, you know, it’s not like you have to really do too much to add it on as as long as we can understand the scope you want to go for. And, and that’s where I think it’s going to be pretty interesting for your private your corporate sector, where I kind of tell this example of someone like an HSBC or maybe even Etihad Airways, something like that, where you’ve got many staff members who have a device from you as the corporate yet, if they’re going to browse online, who is responsible, who essentially has to have that accountability, if during work hours with a device you provided them, they serve or do things that’s probably not appropriate, and eventually ends up being a criminal case, you know, that, you know, these sort of things are important because there’s so much effort on corporate responsibility and accountability in many other areas of having a large enterprise. But what happens to you know, the person who is given a tablet to do their work, maybe even gets kind of, I suppose, attacked, rather than going out and doing something and maybe innocently does something, I think it’s important to say that, you know, this service will, for example, during working hours between the hours of eight and six, provide you with a corporately responsible digital platform or a digital, you know, kind of service on that device, so that, at least you’re protected, or at least you’re doing everything you can, as a as a as a private sector company. And you know, just to play through in one’s mind. Again, there’s some real benefits about this. So, so just to reiterate, guys, who are who are listening, you know, we’re talking about pretty much all of the services that Pangea can offer. But particularly, we’re really excited about putting this on our Multi-network service, which from a start already gives customers with tablets or Mi-Fi’s, or any kind of device access to all the networks around them right through into Europe as well. Should we need to globally even if it comes to that, right, so it’s not just about UK, but it’s about providing access to all the network’s. A really intelligent way of connecting with your data amounts, through our products like Instanet, but then adding a third layer on top, which is now that I can connect everywhere and I can connect efficiently with the data I need. I can control and filter the things that are important to my environment, but also making me responsible either as an employer giving something out or as a government protecting the people around me. So I know we have a lot of our customers who would be interested and are already into talking to us about that. And if you want to learn more about the benefits of filtering, please bring it to our business, but also read my latest blog on the topic. If you want to check out some of the top Content Filtering use cases, you can head over to our new web page, which we’ll be talking specifically about, you know, where you should use it, how you improve productivity by keeping mobile data usage in check, customisable ways in which the service works. And yeah, I mean, hopefully, you can tell we’re pretty excited about this, because there’s not many guys out there who actually doing this sort of thing. So pretty, pretty interesting for us. In closing Chris, anything, anything you want to add to the service?

Chris Romeika
No, I’ll just say I think we’ve covered it, but it’s a it’s a really good product. And it’s got a really strong reporting capability. So it is one of the leading back end systems out there in terms of how long it’s been around, and what it can do.

Dan Cunliffe
For sure. Brilliant. Thanks, man. I appreciate you joining us and giving us a bit of the insights from your side. And to the partners, please do take the time go check out the web page on Content Filtering, send us a message through the call to action buttons on there so you can get in touch or you know even easier, just get hold of your account manager or even call myself and we can we can start having a chat about it. Brilliant, that’s Dan Cunliffe and Chris Romeika, signing off. Have a lovely, lovely rest of your day.