For many network administrators, security and insomnia go hand in hand. After all, threats are omnipresent and attacks can happen at any time, day or night. Add to that the rapid adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, and it becomes easy to see how those threats can evolve into something almost impossible to manage. The answer to stopping those threats doesn’t come from a lifetime supply of No-Doze, but from advanced security technologies that can evolve as rapidly as the threat environment.

The key here is adaptability—the capability of the security solution to adapt to the latest techniques employed fast enough to make a difference and without hindering authorized use and communications. Unlike the traditional approach of throwing hardware at the problem, Websense is looking to bring anti-malware, intrusion prevention and Web security technology to the enterprise via a service. While some may question the validity of hosted service, which protects a network from beyond the edge, Websense looks to quell those doubts by incorporating the latest theories and security techniques into its dynamic protection network, ThreatSeeker.

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In a nutshell, the ThreatSeeker Network enables Websense Hosted Security Services to employ advanced analytics consisting of rules, signatures, heuristics and application behaviors, which detect and block proxy avoidance, hacking sites, adult content, botnets, keyloggers, phishing attacks, spyware and many other types of unsafe content. All of that is aimed at protecting enterprises of more than 500 users from data loss prevention, Web 2.0 threats, malware or most any other threat.

Websense Hosted Security Services takes a different approach than many of the other SAAS (software-as-a-service) security services on the market. Most competing products focus on only a single area of Web security, such as e-mail, content filtering or encryption. Websense, on the other hand, is aiming to offer the whole ball of wax by incorporating a broad range of security technologies into a single service offering.

Of course, protecting a 500-plus user enterprise is far different from protecting a single-location small business. By moving security into a hosted solution, Websense is able to address security for multiple sites, departments and networks all from a common point and, at the same time, eliminate many layers of security hardware.

There are many advantages to that approach. For example, the cost of security hardware can be reduced significantly. Also, security updates can be applied immediately across the enterprise, ensuring consistency and eliminating overlooked locations. Management also becomes much easier—a single console can manage security for numerous locations, updates can be better automated, alerts are more encompassing and enterprise-level reports can be created quickly.