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Q&A with May Mitchell
Vice President of Product Marketing, Websense, Inc.

A: Websense was recognized by a leading industry analyst firm for having one of the most comprehensive content security suites on the market today. The industry validation positions Websense squarely in, what we like to call, the "sweet spot" of the content security market.

A: In today's world companies are faced with a unique blend of threats—threats originating on the Web, delivered in e-mail, and targeted at business-critical information. The industry has identified Web, messaging and data loss prevention as the three key threat vectors that businesses must protect themselves against. Websense is the only vendor to protect against these threats with its industry-leading solutions covering all three of those areas.

A:When I speak with customers, they tell me that they are worried about protecting their information, and that they don't know where the next threat is coming from, or what form it will take.

Increasingly, we're seeing blended threats appear across a combination of these three channels. For example, a threat today could take the form of a spam email that, through social engineering, tricks the victim into visiting a Web site that has malicious code on it. That Web site could automatically install a Trojan horse onto the victim's computer. The Trojan horse might then scour the files of the computer to pump information to the cyber criminals.

Because of the rise in blended threats, businesses need to have a security solution that protects their information against spam, malicious Web sites and outbound data loss. If organizations have only one or two of those areas covered, they are leaving one of their most precious assets - their information - open to attack.

A: We started out with an advantage because of our unparalleled knowledge of the Internet and Web-based threats. Websense Security Labs™ constantly discovers, investigates and reports on the latest Internet threats - so we've long been on the forefront of knowing where malware resides on the Web, discovering where threats are coming from, and identifying how they are evolving.

We also make it a priority to listen to our customers and channel partners. We knew this is where the security industry would need to move, so we developed a strategy to become a leader in all three critical areas. We built our comprehensive portfolio through internal development and also through strategic acquisitions. In 2007, we acquired PortAuthority and SurfControl in order to bring industry-leading data loss prevention and e-mail filtering capabilities to our repertoire. Less than a year later, it's nice to see our strategy paying off and to be recognized by the industry for the strong portfolio we developed.

A: We've received great response from our customers and our partners. They recognize that what we're doing is different from other security vendors because we're focused on the most valuable piece - the information itself. By focusing on content, no matter what form it takes, where it is at or how it is used, we enable organizations to apply their protection policies simultaneously across Web sites and content. The result is intelligent content protection throughout Web gateways, across the network and all endpoints.

A:The growing adoption of Web 2.0 is driving the need now more than ever. With Web 2.0, users can control the content of (and create content for) blogs, wikis, mashups, social networking sites and many other popular Internet destinations. It is easy for any one of those users to embed malicious code into the content of a Web 2.0 application. We all know that traditional security solutions are no longer effective in protecting organizations against emerging threats - and Web 2.0 hasn't made it onto the radar of the anti-virus vendors.

Businesses of all sizes depend on information communicated over the Internet, so they cannot simply ban the use of these channels. Instead, they must secure them, in order to protect their essential information from the current and future threats.