Firewalls are great. Until your employees leave the building.

That's the reality the City of Visalia, a municipality of over 140,000 residents in California's Central Valley, was facing. Their IT team, including Information Systems Analyst Chris Terry, had built a solid security foundation on traditional firewall protections. But as city employees started working from more locations and more traffic moved direct-to-internet, those perimeter-based controls were becoming less effective. Protection depended on whether a device was on the network. If it wasn't, gaps could exist.

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The challenge: Consistent security without the complexity

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Visalia's team needed to solve a specific set of problems. They wanted better control and visibility over web traffic without introducing complexity or degrading the user experience. They needed policies that followed the user, not the network. They needed to block malicious destinations, reduce phishing and malware risk, and catch higher-risk web activity in real time.

And they needed to do it without ripping out infrastructure or spending months tuning a new system.

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The search: Most options were too heavy

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The City evaluated a mix of SWGs, firewall-based filtering tools, and cloud security platforms. The pattern was consistent, solutions either required significant deployment effort, cost too much, or couldn't deliver the real-time visibility and control Visalia needed across all 700+ users, regardless of location.

For a government IT team, that approach isn’t always practical. You need something that’s effective on day one, not day ninety.

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Why dope.security

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dope.security stood out for three reasons:
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Simplicity. No infrastructure overhaul. No complex routing changes. The agent deploys directly on the device and starts protecting immediately.

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SSL decryption on-device. This is the big one. dope.security performs break-and-inspect locally  on the endpoint itself, which means Visalia gets full visibility into encrypted web traffic without backhauling it through a data center or relying on VPNs to route everything back through the network. That’s a fundamentally different architecture than what legacy vendors offer.

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Real-time policy enforcement. The City’s IT team can now block unknown or high-risk domains instantly. No waiting for firewall rule propagation. No multi-step change management process. Policies push in real time from dope.console, and the agent enforces them wherever the device happens to be.

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Life after dope.security

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Since deploying across their 700+ user workforce, Visalia has seen exactly what they were looking for: better visibility, stronger control, and less operational overhead.

The team can quickly identify and block threats, enforce consistent policies across every user, on-network or off, and reduce their reliance on legacy firewall-based web filtering. Deployment was straightforward, and ongoing management has been minimal. In Chris Terry's words: the solution "helped strengthen our security posture without adding operational overhead." For a city government protecting residents' data, public services, and municipal systems, that’s not just convenient. That’s essential.

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Why this matters

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Government IT teams don’t get the same budgets or headcount as Fortune 500 companies, but they face many of the same threats. Phishing campaigns target city employees. Ransomware impacts municipal systems. And when the workforce becomes more mobile, traditional perimeter security becomes less effective.

dope.security was built for exactly this scenario, lean teams that need strong protection without unnecessary complexity. Agent-based protection, direct-to-internet traffic, and policies that follow the user all managed from a single console.

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Protecting a workforce that doesn't sit behind a firewall?  

Book a 20-minute demo and see how dope.security works for government and public sector teams.

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