Websense Review

Internet access in the workplace has become a necessity of the modern era. Unfortunately, with it come a number of problems. How an employer deals with these will depend on the size of his or her workforce but there is no place in today's electronic office environment for draconian methods. Total trust is also a thing of the past - now both employers and employees require a modicum of protection. With the growing number of legal requirements that surround Internet access it has become necessary to provide clear guidelines on acceptable use and to provide a clear and workable security policy.

To do all this with ease requires a good employee Internet management (EIM) solution, one that fits in with the growing needs of your network environment. Websense Enterprise can provide this type of protection. With the capability of handling 500 requests per second, this is a particularly scalable and easily managed software solution. Using policy-based access management, it can integrate with your own policy to provide the type of filtering that is desirable for your particular circumstances.

Websense Enterprise integrates with your existing proxy server and firewall or it can be set up as a standalone server in its own right. Therefore, the choice is yours - either have it on the same machine as your Microsoft Proxy Server or base it on a separate machine. This solution also integrates with a number of valuable and highly regarded vendor solutions such as the Check Point Firewall-1 and the Cisco Secure PIX Firewall.

Websense Enterprise filters, monitors and reports on what is happening on your internal network in relation to Internet access. Other immediate benefits are that your legal liabilities are greatly reduced, as is your bandwidth! Websense Enterprise works by checking the content and filtering to your corporate demands. An existing database includes more than 1,500,000 sites that can be blocked, permitted or postponed, depending on your chosen settings. Managing your users in groups or individually by title, and even by time of day, can ensure that they aren't surfing undesirable sites in company time and thus increasing bandwidth usage and lowering productivity.

System requirements are a Pentium II processor with 128Mb of RAM, NT 4.0 (SP5 or higher) or Windows 2000 with Microsoft Proxy Server 2.0 update. Once installed you can opt to use remote administration from anywhere on the network to manage your EIM solution. Where an alert is necessary this may also be provided to give an easily managed solution. Once installed, the global policy will be up and running and ready for you to define your own usage boundaries.

In all there are three components that come with the Websense Enterprise solution, and each plays its part in making this a very versatile solution for your Internet access concerns in the workplace. The Websense Server is the component needed for integration with the Internet filtering product you may already have in use on your network. The Websense Manager is the component through which all configuration and management is accomplished, and the Websense Database provides the huge number of Internet addresses (URLs) used to achieve the correct level of access for your employees. This is downloaded after the initial install is complete.

There are also two other components that are free to Websense Enterprise owners. One is the Websense Reporter and the other Log Server. These record Internet activity and then provide the means to report in a variety of ways, giving you the means to view resources, usage and other important factors that may help you to redefine your Internet access policy.

Managing this solution is very easily accomplished with the useful and comfortable Websense Manager window. The GUI is comfortable to work with and the icons on the tool bar are fairly self-explanatory, making the whole job straightforward. Again, choosing how your employees access the Internet and to which areas they have access is also easily accomplished. Your users may be put into groups by workstations, departments, individual users or by networks; they are all identified by their IP addresses and they are collectively known as clients.

Each client will be controlled through the chosen filtering depending on the restrictions they have been assigned. However, blocking may involve certain times of day or it may mean a complete block on that area. You may also add 'custom' URLs to stop access to areas that would otherwise be permitted, so you can see, there are endless possibilities.

You may want to provide your employees with certain privileges and allow them to use shopping areas or banking sites, etc., out of hours. There is a Websense AfterWork option that takes care of all this. It allows the employee access to certain areas without it affecting productivity; however it is still a carefully controlled option so that bandwidth can still be protected.

Of course Internet access is not just something to be wary of, it is a powerful tool that can provide a huge insight into how departments work and Websense can provide the reports that can help to show these trends, good or bad. The reports also help further development of policies and provide the bigger picture.

Finally, this highly scalable and easily managed EIM solution also provides daily updates to its already huge database of URLs. These are accomplished overnight when the network is expected to be quiet, to keep up with the ever-increasing number of new sites that appear daily.