'Understand the seriousness of spyware, Internet hacking'

A leading player in the web-content filtering market, Websense has come out
with solutions to help enterprises evolve a more efficient employee-Internet
environment. Tom Gibb, director, Asia-Pacific Sales spoke to Jasmine Kaur of
Dataquest about the company's Indian initiatives. Excerpts:

How does Websense address employee-Internet management?

Websense adds an additional layer of security to the enterprise, allowing
businesses to monitor, report, and manage how their employees use the Internet.
This supports the organization's efforts to improve employee productivity,
conserve network bandwidth, and mitigate legal liability. Our suites keep a tab
on more than 13 mn protocols, URLs, and websites; preventing employees from
going to spyware sites, falling prey to phishing, and even Internet hacking. The
other functions are resolving resource issues and providing security from
unsuspected virus downloads through attachments in instant messaging. Our most
recent launch, the Websense corporate edition, helps centralized IT
administrators set universal Internet-access policies, while allowing remote
administrators to adopt lower-level policies to reflect local standards and
requirements. All reports coming out of the system help companies set policies
for employee-Internet usage.

What are the various deployment levels on which the offerings work?

Tom Gibb

Our products work at three control points. Those at the desktop level provide
defense against blended threats, malware, virus outbreak, etc. Solutions at the
network level help prioritize business-critical processing. At the
Internet-gateway level we exercise control on bandwidth-intensive downloads,
spyware, and cyber slacking. Depending on the level of deployment, the solution
can cost an average of $20 per seat. We have also forged an agreement with
Nortel to develop web-content filtering solution to protect GSM/UMTS mobile
handsets from receiving and accessing unwarranted content.