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Overview and Essentials

Create and manage rulesets to control the web content access of Local and Remote Devices.

Important Notes:

Changing default Category Allow/Block settings

The DrawBridge comes with a preset Action for each included Category. When you assign an Action (Allow/Block) to a Category, you're simply applying a change that gets higher priority than the default setting. This means:

  1. You don't need to re-specify your Action preference for every built-in Category -- you only need to include the Categories in your Access Policy that you wish to assign a different action to than is default.

    For example: built-in Category Sports is set to a default action of Block.

    • If Block is the action you prefer, you do not need to add it to an Access Policy (eg. Company Preferences) with an action of Block -- the default setting is already doing this.
    • If Allow is the action you prefer, then you do need to add it to an Access Policy (eg. Company Preferences) with an action of Allow to override the default action.

  2. In the event a custom Access Policy is removed, the filter will revert to the default Action for that Category.

Default Category settings are Business-focused

The default settings for the Built-in Categories are tightly scoped to business-usage needs. Depending on your usage expectations, you will want to set more categories to Allow in your Company Preferences Access Policy, or in a custom Access Policy.

What is an Access Policy?

An Access policy is the grouping of Devices, Actions, Times, (and, optionally, Applications) to create a customized DrawBridge content filter configuration.

This diagram illustrates: accesspolicy.drawio.png

The Drawbridge supports the "stacking" or "layering" of Access Policies, enabling you to tailor the content filter experience for your users.

Access Policies by Type/Scope

  • Company Access Policies: ruleset scope: one Company
  • Access Policy Groups: ruleset scope: one Accountability Policy; available to apply to member Companies
  • Universal Access Policy Groups: ruleset scope: globally available to all DrawBridges
  • System Access Policies: rulesets scoped a specific DrawBridge; applies to all tenant Companies on that system

Company Access Policies

All access policies that are available or are associated with a particular Company. If you’re signed in as an administrator you will see all policies associated with all the companies on that DrawBridge.

Click the drop-down option to display the Action Group and Device Group associated with a particular excess policy line.

Actions for regular categories

  • Allow
  • Block
  • Ignore

Actions for ACL categories

Whitelist

A Category consisting of domains (and/or regular expression patterns) that the DrawBridge will Always Allow, in spite of the content scores. Use with caution!

Filter processing flowchart:

Whitelistfilter.drawio.png

Blacklist

A Category consisting of domains (and/or regular expression patterns) that the DrawBridge will Always Bllow, in spite of the content scores.

Filter processing flowchart:

Blacklistlistfilter.png

Blanketblock

A Category consisting of domains (and/or regular expression patterns) to which the DrawBridge will apply regular category-based filtering and block access to all other sites not specified in the blanketblock category (or a linked category)

Filter processing flowchart:

Blanketblock2.drawio.png

Normal Category Filtering (for comparison)

Defaultfilter.drawio.png

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