How Computers Nationwide Replaced Blind DNS Filtering With Full Browser Visibility

Computers Nationwide is a managed service provider serving roughly 40 managed clients, plus a handful of direct clients, across the Chicago, Madison, and Milwaukee area, with 2,000 to 2,500 endpoints under management. Network Engineer Mark Farberg, who has been with the company for 26 years, works on the security stack it offers those clients, which also includes Huntress for endpoint detection and response, SaaS Alerts for Microsoft 365 hardening, ConnectSecure for internal vulnerability scanning, and mail filtering.

That stack is always evolving. The team attends industry events each year to meet vendors and re-vet every product on a continuous basis, measuring each one against what its clients actually need. Atakama came into the lineup through one of those events, filling a specific gap: line of sight into the browser, alongside the endpoint and network tools already in place.

A filter that could only say blocked or malicious wasn't answering what clients were asking

Before Atakama, Computers Nationwide relied on a DNS filtering tool for web protection. It did the basic job of flagging a site as blocked or malicious, but that was where it stopped. Clients wanted to understand what was happening behind that decision, not just whether a link had been allowed through.

That gap mattered most to the clients themselves. The value of closing it, as Farberg frames it, lands with the businesses Computers Nationwide serves rather than with the MSP's own operations.

Browser-level granularity, rolled out through tooling the team already ran

Deployment went through ConnectWise Automate, Computers Nationwide's existing remote monitoring and management tool, using an automated script. From there it was a matter of connecting each client's Microsoft 365 tenant to the Atakama portal.

That granularity extends to emerging risk. Computers Nationwide sets the AI classification to warn across its customer base, giving the team a read on adoption while most clients are still early in working out their own AI policies.

Quarterly reviews now surface browser activity nobody on either side could see before

One of the first things that stood out after deployment was the sheer volume of ad-driven traffic running in the background of everyday browsing, activity most end users never notice is happening at all.

That same visibility carries into quarterly business reviews. Clients are regularly surprised at the sites their own employees are willing to visit during the workday, and Farberg's team can now back that up with data rather than guesswork.

AI usage has produced the same kind of moment. In one quarterly review, a client learned that an employee was spending roughly 20 hours a month on ChatGPT without anyone on the client side realizing it, which gave the business owner a concrete starting point for a conversation with that end user about what was being shared and why.