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.

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 Websense Data Security Suite includes four individual, and integrated modules. Websense Data Discover, which provides the locating, fingerprinting, and classification of data as described above; Websense Data Monitor, which supplies passive monitoring of network traffic (external and internal) for inclusion of sensitive data; Websense Data Protect, which combines Websense Data Monitor with policy-based, in-line enforcement capabilities for both Web (HTTP) and E-mail (SMTP) traffic; and the new Websense Data Endpoint module, which resides on endpoint machines such as laptops and provides protection from sensitive data being transferred to USB devices, local printers, copy/paste actions, etc.

Also new to the platform is integration of the product with the vendor's new Websense Web Security Gateway; enabling the gateway to itself include both data loss prevention and Web security (content and URL filtering, anti-spam/virus, etc.) features.

Contact Websense for further information.