Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes—every time. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. In this episode, I'm joined by Scott Glew and Mark di Muzio as we dive into how Fastvue technology leverages firewall logs to provide powerful insights into user activity on the network. With a strong focus on wellbeing, this solution is especially valuable for schools, TAFEs, and universities, as well as organisations like local councils. We also uncover some unexpected use cases—real-world examples where Fastvue delivers meaningful insights that can lead to positive individual outcomes. Learn more about Fastvue For more details contact [email protected] or visit www.taylormadesales.com.au  Here is the refined text with Australian spelling: Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10 Minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. Leanne Taylor: Hi everybody. I'm Leanne Taylor from Taylormade Sales, and today we have a great conversation for you about Fastvue. And today it's a pleasure to introduce Scott Glue and Mark Di Muzio to tell us all about Fastvue. What do you guys do, and why do my customers need to know you? Scott Glew: Thanks Leanne. Yeah, my name's Scott Glue and I'm the chief product officer and co-founder at Fastvue. Fastvue provides online safety monitoring and internet usage reporting for the world's leading firewalls. So, if you're using a Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks, Sophos, SonicWall, Cisco, those sorts of firewalls, then Fastvue will read in their log data and provide real-time alerts, reports, and dashboards that give you a clear visibility into what's happening online. Leanne Taylor: So what's some examples of some of the reporting that you can tailor from Fastvue? Scott Glew: Sure. So it's used super heavily in schools to detect students at risk of self-harm, suicide, extremism, radicalisation, which unfortunately we see every other day in schools. It's also used a lot by local councils and government organisations to ensure safety in places like public libraries. And a lot of corporate organisations also use Fastvue to help them with that horrible job that does come up from time to time of conducting employee investigations when they're required because no one likes doing that, but when you have to do it, you want it to be really easy and you want that report to be super accurate as well. So, just trying to provide the world's best reporting for the world's leading firewalls. Leanne Taylor: And really a customer can tailor that reporting to suit what they need, right? So let's just touch on on schools and education, because that's quite a hot topic at the moment for around student well-being. And I'm sure there's a lot of people listening going, what, really? You know, suicide and you know, what have you? Can you give us some examples of how you do that and why that's important in schools? Mark Di Muzio: Hi Leanne. Yeah, that is a good question on how we can actually help schools around those sorts of topics of suicide or extremism and why a solution like ours is very important. Having been in the industry for over a decade working with schools with different solutions, what I've been able to sort of see with Fastvue is as much as data is important, the accuracy of data is even more important. So what we're able to do with Fastvue is actually take out a lot of the white noise. So when we're reporting or alerting, it is as accurate as possible that we make sure that we talk to the right student in the right way about the right thing. Mark Di Muzio: So, examples of that would be that if you've got a student that was to go to an afl.com site to have a look at where their team was on the ladder, you can find that they have embedded sites like Sportsbet 365. So other solutions might say that a student has actually gone to a gambling site, but what we're able to actually do is show that they actually went to the AFL site, but the gambling site was also there, which means you never have to talk to that student about going to a gambling site. You know that they never went there, so that awkward conversation or accusing a student of doing something they didn't do doesn't have to happen. And that way you avoid actually turning a good student into a bad student or having to have a confrontational event with the parents of that student when they're obviously have done nothing wrong. Leanne Taylor: It's an interesting one for schools because obviously when students log on to the school network, it can be really difficult to get visibility as to what the kids are actually doing on the network, right? So you think they're in English, but they're in the back of the class on their laptop searching crazy cat videos or something on YouTube. And I know a lot of schools have tried to tackle that through closing down and whitelisting on their firewall and things like that. But with, you know, my daughter's doing VisCom at the moment for year 12, and they do have to go on and search certain things through YouTube or or what have you. So that becomes problematic for that classroom teacher that then has to go to IT and say, can you allow this website or application because we're using it as part of our learning. So tap on how all that comes together with you guys. Scott Glew: Yeah, great question. It's something that schools are constantly battling with, you know, the boundary between what do we allow and what do we block. Certainly for lower school, like year sevens and eights and and primary schools, you've got a different set of concerns to upper schools in in year 11 and 12. You definitely want to provide a more open internet. So what we try and advocate for is keeping an eye on what's happening online so that you don't have to block as much. You know, it's really easy just to say let's block YouTube because we've got some kids that are wasting time watching cat videos and streaming games and and whatever it might be from from YouTube. But you can keep an eye on it, you can actually get alerts when when that's being abused so that the IT team and the coordination with teachers doesn't have to be a big pain. We can just say, well, let's let's allow it and let's keep an eye on what's happening. Leanne Taylor: What I like about Fastvue is it often all these solutions with the IT team, and it's technology that they need to to implement. So there is an element of IT involvement to to install the solution, but it's really a business solution, isn't it? So explain how that works with the reporting to the principal, to wellness, to all different levels. Mark Di Muzio: Well, absolutely, Leanne. I'm happy to to answer that. So, I suppose Fastvue basically has a component within its solution for every level of a school from that point of view. A lot of principals are very interested in the data and we're able to supply bandwidth, who's using the bandwidth. Are they, have they got the right pipe size coming into the school to allow for what they need to do. And we can actually highlight whether they do need to increase their internet connectivity or whether there's something going on in the school that's actually limiting that internet connectivity or pipe that they could actually remove, thus saving the cost of having to buy a larger connection into the school as well. Mark Di Muzio: We find that student guidance officers like our solution because of the accuracy that we look at productivity for students. So, are they spending time going to Netflix when they should be in class? And therefore they can have a conversation with those students about not watching cat videos or basketball videos during their chemistry class, and therefore they can increase productivity. In fact, recently we had a school that put our solution on and they sort of said within two weeks of our solution being in place, they saw an increase of productivity within the school because they were able to detect those students that were spending time on sites that were not productive and they were able to have those conversations. Mark Di Muzio: From a well-being perspective, because we have the real-time alerts, if a student does something of a risky nature or inappropriate nature, then they will get that in a real-time alert or a daily, weekly, or monthly report that they can follow up with that student and make sure that they can have the right conversation with them. Mark Di Muzio: And then for the IT manager within the school, we do have a lot of reporting on the firewall as well. So they're able to get a lot of reporting from the firewall that firewalls generally can't supply that well. And that means that they can actually answer a lot of questions. I'll hand over to Scott to develop a little bit more around that. Scott Glew: Yeah, I was just going to add to that on the technical side. So, as you say, Leanne, it is a technical solution. It's the firewall at the end of the day where this data is coming from. And, so one example we had was the IT person realised that the kids were watching Netflix at 3:00 in the morning. This was a boarding school, so they had kids in their boarding house and they they had a rule that would turn on or turn off at 10:30 p.m. to stop kids from accessing Netflix and YouTube and sort of hope that they go to bed and get a good night's sleep ready for school the next day. And when they discovered that Netflix and YouTube were being accessed at 3:00 in the morning, they were able to drill down into that data and see the firewall rule that was actually allowing that traffic. And what they found is that at 10:30 p.m. all of the traffic started flowing down to the next rule, which was all visitors. So basically they had unfiltered internet access after 10:30 p.m., which was the exact opposite of what that rule was intended to do. So yeah, it wasn't just Netflix and YouTube going on after 10:30, there was a lot of other traffic as well, which was a bit of a concern. So, providing those reports back to the IT team to help them troubleshoot what's actually happening on their firewall and actually adapt their policies in the most efficient and effective way is also a key benefit of of using Fastvue. Leanne Taylor: Before we move on to the other verticals, I wouldn't mind you touching on, you know, back on the well-being topic, because obviously bullying and unfortunately suicide is a thing within our education system and with our young people. So have you got some examples of of how you've been able to alert to this and mitigate perhaps save a life based on your reporting? Mark Di Muzio: I suppose Leanne, one thing about our solution is it's 100% private. So we don't actually see any of the reports or the alerts that occur. When we have examples, it's if a school is prepared to discuss those with us. And we can appreciate that a lot of schools like to keep that within their school system. But we had recently a a school where an alert did come through about a student and they were able to pull that student out of class and have a discussion. They were then able to inform the parents. The parents actually came and took that uh student away and the parents were very happy with the way the school had dealt with it and the way that the solution had highlighted the incident that was occurring. For some schools, we do hear that. We don't push them for examples, but we do know that it's working. I think Scott might have a little bit more information on that, so I'll hand over to Scott. Scott Glew: Yeah, I was just speaking to a school the other day and was looking over what some of their reports and alerts, and one of them that was quite concerning was a student searching for "fun ways to commit suicide." So not just committing suicide, but fun ways to do it. And in the same time, I think it was the next day was searches from that same student about where to hide a bomb at school. So now we're talking about not just an individual situation, but actually being quite a large incident that could affect a lot more students and parents and and the community. So that was definitely uh a concerning incident that we saw just recently. Leanne Taylor: So let's pivot across to the other industries that you mentioned around councils and libraries and also in the corporate space. Have you got some examples of how those industries are using your solution? Scott Glew: Yeah, absolutely. So, um we do a lot of business in the UK and the US as well. So this one that comes to mind is a UK council. So they've got a public library, they've also got a prison in it's quite a large local council. And they've got the issue where say sex offenders may get released from prison. And as part of their parole, they're not allowed to have a computer at home. So they go to the public library to search for jobs and things like that. And then the police come along and say, "Hey, local council, can you please run a report on what was happening on that library computer?" And unfortunately, we have found people reoffending. We have actually our reports have been used in court cases to help convict murderers. So there was a couple that were plotting to do a murder in a public library because they didn't want to do the research at home because they thought they might be monitored or or found or traced back to their home address. So they went to the library to uh to do this research and that was uh quite incriminating evidence. Scott Glew: And we've also helped find a kidnapped child, a father sort of it was a custody concern and kidnapped his son out of school and the police knew that he went to the library the day before or something. So we got a report on that and saw that he'd actually booked some campground sites. So the police went to the campground and found the father and son there. So it's been used in some pretty heavy duty situations in in local councils. Scott Glew: But in the corporate space, yeah, it's usually from that point of view of doing a employee investigation when required or just sending scheduled reports out to HR and managers so that they can manage their employees more effectively. Because I'm sure everyone's had that situation of, I've got an employee, they're not quite hitting their numbers or I just need to know that, I sort of walk past their screen and I see all the windows suddenly minimise and all of those things. So I just want to get enough information to know what's happening. Because that's that is really the key when you're having those awkward discussions with employees is that you need evidence. It's really easy for an employee just to say, "No, I wasn't doing that, you know?" and it gets quite confrontational. But to be able to just lay out that evidence and say, "Well, this is what was going on," it can really help change that conversation. Leanne Taylor: And I'm assuming that works in the hybrid workplace as well. Does the user need to be on the corporate network or if someone is working from home, does that still apply? Scott Glew: Yeah, absolutely. So as long as you are going through the firewall is basically what it comes down to. So a lot of these firewalls have some kind of endpoint or VPN back into the firewall, however that wants to work. We've got a range of solutions these days, SASE and clients. As long as the firewall is aware of that activity, then we can report on it. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic, guys. And one last thing talking, obviously most customers go, "This sounds great. How much does it cost?" One of the things I love about working with you is that it's not an expensive solution to install for a customer. So can you maybe talk around your pricing bundles and how that works? Mark Di Muzio: Look, happy to do that for you, Leanne. It's a very economical solution. You know, the firewall is the principal component and then we actually pull that information from the firewall and mix it with our own little bit of magic to make everything happen. So we generally do it based on seats. A corporate environment to an education environment. We do have special pricing for education, which is cheaper than corporate because we understand that education doesn't always have the same sort of funding as a corporate environment might have. So we generally look at it based on the number of seats within that environment. So it could be up to a 50 seat for a a small business, or we start schools usually we start at uh 500 and under and work our way up in 500 increments from that. So 1 to 500, 501 to 1,000, 1,000 to 1,500, and so on and so on for schools. But businesses we do start at a lot lower number to allow for that. We have dealt with schools which were quite rural and maybe only had three or four students, and we're able to come up with special pricing. Because from Fastvue's uh perspective, the most important thing is the well-being of the students within a school environment. So we're happy to have a look at that pricing to make sure that we can do the best that we can to help the students of that school. Leanne Taylor: And so is it a proof of concept or a demo? How can people engage with you? Mark Di Muzio: Fastvue always offers a 14-day free trial for a proof of concept within your environment. But if you actually go to fastvue.co/tms and download it from there, we'll extend that trial to 30 days for our uh Taylormade Sales clients that are interested in the solution as a bonus for listening to this podcast. The solution just needs to be downloaded into either VMware, Hyper-V, or Docker, or even private cloud. So it should only take five or 10 minutes to set up if you already have that environment in place. Leanne Taylor: Well, thank you guys. It's always great to chat to you about Fastvue. It's a great solution and it's a great conversation I love having with our customers. So thank you very much for coming into the studio today and I look forward to more conversations with you. Scott Glew: No problem. Thanks very much, Leanne. Thanks for having us. Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylormade Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up-to-date, informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time.  

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