Originally acquired from PortAuthority Technologies, Websense Data Security Suite (formerly Websense Content Protection Suite) is a discovery and monitoring tool that scans multiple forms of communications and alerts administrators if those communications are determined to contain confidential information as well as provides policy enforcement options. Integration with the vendor's other site/URL classification products enables the suite to recognize and apply policies to the transfer of confidential information based on the site being visited or site category.

The primary components of the platform leverage the vendor's PreciseID data analysis and identification technology, which analyzes targeted confidential information and builds from it an "information fingerprint," a mathematical representation of characters, words, sentences or data fields of the document, message or database; a process that does not require modification or tagging of the original data. Using this information fingerprint in combination with other ID methods including keywords, patterns, lexicons, and regular expressions, monitoring appliances can watch for the transmission of sensitive data across the network, even if the data has been manipulated. The vendor notes that the platform is able to recognize over 370 file formats.

For the analysis of data at rest, the product discovers network shares/drives and then performs regular expression analysis and/or fingerprinting with PreciseID. Additionally, it can connect to databases via an ODBC connection, or you can point it at specific file repositories that you would like to perform discovery on.

Policy definitions can be customized by user, group, department, location, partner, domain, and more (LDAP and MS A/D integration is supported) and policies can be configured to send alerts to the original senders of the data or IT. Inline, native enforcement of HTTP and SMTP-based communications is supported; and the product can additionally be deployed via SPAN/TAP ports and used in conjunction with an existing gateway/proxy tool.

The base product configuration is agent-less in nature; the product's auditing capabilities enable it to discover shares and drives and analyze their information in an agent-less fashion. Forthcoming from the vendor is an endpoint-based component that will apply the product's discovery and monitoring capabilities locally on host machines; even if the machine is disconnected from the corporate network. Context-based policies will allow for the definition of controls at the user, content, application, or media-type levels. The endpoint-level functionality is expected to debut in 2008.

Closely related to the Websense Data Security Suite (DSS) is the vendor's new Websense Data Discover software, a stand alone tool that allows organizations to leverage the suite's data discovery capabilities without the included monitoring or enforcement features. Websense Data Discover can be purchased and implemented as a stand alone offering apart from the broader Websense Data Security Suite.

Contact Websense for further information.

product submission by EITPlanet Staff

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