Any business understands the importance of managing their internet. Whether it is blocking access to undesirable content, preventing hackers or managing latency - people want their internet clean, fast and secure.

IT professionals and businesses are faced with expensive options when it comes to managing their clients' internet effectively. Solutions are often complicated, pricey and difficult to manage.

LucidView, in combination with Mikrotik, is here to streamline the process and better yet - it is now free.

What is MikroTik?

MikroTik is an affordable router product that can compete with products ten times more expensive. As such it is gaining market share across the world against the big names in the industry. According to MikroTik, it “manufactures routers, switches and wireless systems for every purpose, from small office or home to carrier ISP networks…there is a device for every purpose.”

MikroTik has its own Operating System, called RouterOS which is “the operating system of RouterBOARD hardware. It has all the necessary features for an ISP - routing, firewall, bandwidth management, wireless access point, backhaul link, hotspot gateway, VPN server and more.”

Therefore MikroTik provides easy, inexpensive and efficient hardware and networking solutions.

What is the LucidView Enforcer?

LucidView has been in the business of providing Internet Management tools since 2005. Technology has come a long way since those early days of broadband and cellphone data putting the Internet into everyone’s hands. Individuals and companies are now in need of clean, secure, fast and visible Internet without purchasing expensive products or having to upgrade their Internet links at a huge cost.

Keeping in line with Mikrotik’s inexpensive and efficient solutions, Lucidview has developed The Enforcer, a configuration script which turns your Mikrotik into a powerful internet management solution. This solution includes content filtering, IPS, shaping and reporting tools and is easily managed via our online portal and dashboard. With Mikrotik and the Enforcer configuration, you will have access to powerful internet management tools at your fingertips.

This configuration script provides opportunities to any IT professional or company looking to start, or improve, their service offering as an MSP, ISP, WISP or IT consulting company.

LucidView has recently started to provide its MikroTik Enforcer scripts to smaller scale businesses and customers at no cost, in other words, the solution is now 100% free to individuals and small to medium businesses.

How can you, the IT professional, take advantage of this opportunity?

The LucidView Enforcer is MikroTik approved and the configuration script is designed to run on an already configured MikroTik router. If you already have a MikroTik Router, running these scripts will not affect the base networking configuration or any other configurations you may have running on your RouterOS.

A LucidView Enforcer has the following key features:

● DNS and Firewall based Content Filtering

● Intrusion prevention and detection

● Content based traffic shaping

● Reports, Dashboards and traffic flow analysis

The Enforcer leverages LucidView’s extensive cloud-based Content Filter & IPS database API. This database is built and constantly updated every hour of every day by LucidView’s web crawlers which form part of its own AI. The crawlers assess every IP address or website that is accessed, determine its nature and allocate it to an appropriate category, in real time.

Using the Enforcer one can block categories such as adult, gambling, movies, etc. One can also set time based rules for categories such as social media that one may only wish to allow at certain times.

An additional Enforcer feature is its Saturation Manager which is a powerful content based traffic shaping solution. This ensures that critical, latency sensitive content is never impacted by streaming services that automatically ramp up the resolution to use all the available bandwidth. You can also throttle Windows, Android and IOS updates so that they don’t impact the responsiveness of your internet connection. In our experience, this leads to the reduction of costs by eliminating the need to increase your bandwidth.

The Enforcer also provides an advanced behaviour based Intrusion Protection Solution (IPS). Online security is a top of mind issue for almost everybody these days. Hardly a week goes past where we don’t hear about a large data breach or ransomware attack (and these are just the ones we hear about, most organisations do not even make such attacks public). 

 The LucidView AI analyses every connection coming into or leaving your network and enables the LucidView enforcer to protect you against malicious or un-wished for connections. It is particularly good at recognising and eliminating phone-home connections which are installed by nefarious hackers.

LucidView’s reports, dashboards and traffic-flow analysis tools provide extensive insight into every aspect of the network. Visibility is key to security as “you can’t manage what you can’t see”.

Our website provides a detailed guide on how to apply these scripts.

In conclusion, providing a managed internet solution to your customers should be inexpensive, efficient and accessible. This is now possible thanks to the LucidView Enforcer and Mikrotik.

Please do visit our website at www.lucidview.net for more information on this product. Feel free to create an account and build as many Enforcers as you need.