Officials with Websense today announced that the company has reached the culmination of years’ worth of work to unveil a highly integrated security architecture that puts all of the company’s disparate products into a single platform that some of its VARs say will shift the security paradigm for the channel.
Dubbed TRITON, the unified architecture for the first time fully meshes the content analysis and malware protection of the Websense Web Security Gateway with the data leak prevention capabilities of Websense Data Security Suite and the e-mail protection features of Websense Email Security into a single, modular ecosystem. As in the past, VARs and solution providers are given the flexibility to sell one or all of these products, but the difference now is the ease of deployment and integration of the product sets should customers decide to go with one module and then later add more.
Most importantly to the channel, TRITON gives solution providers and customers the ability to centrally manage all of the security capabilities of each Websense product on a single, hybrid on-premise and software-as-a-service(SaaS) platform, greatly reducing the total cost of ownership and overall administrative hassles.
“TRITON represents a game-changing security solution for Websense and its channel partners,” says Paul Dhanota, owner of Evolve Technology Group, a Websense channel partner in Sacramento, Calif. “There’s no question the unified content security architecture found within TRITON delivers a major technology advantage.
Equally important is the flexibility, efficiency and IT management capabilities gained from using the new Websense TruHybrid deployment and TRITON management console. With TRITON, we can easily manage our on-premise and SaaS customers from a single management console which means incredible cost-savings and profitability gains."
The other advantage to the channel is the power TRITON gives partners to leverage existing investments by customers into the architecture in order to sell more high-value, high-margin services into their environments.
"I was talking to a partner the other day, about how they can leverage this in their security practice, whether it be from policy design to remediation planning, to risk assessment services. It really opens the door to leverage our technology and customer’s existing investments to take this solution one step forward," says Dave Meizlik, director of product marketing for Websense. "A partner can go in and maybe sell a customer one of the modules, so maybe they start out with our Web Security Gateway, and what they can do with that is the partner can go in and say, ‘Listen, you’re taking advantage of Websense today for web security. I’m going to give you a license key and we’re going to enable some additional services and we’re going to do a risk assessment on data loss in your enterprise."
Then it’s only a matter of flipping the switch to turn that functionality on either temporarily or in perpetuity in order to get a feel for the organization’s risk and add a service offering based on that intelligence, he explains.
The differentiator behind TRITON and the engine behind this flexibility is TruHybrid, a policy mangement and reporting infrastructure that unifies protection across on-premise, SaaS and hybrid deployment models, enabling customers the ability to set policies across geographically dispersed offices and remote worker endpoints and manage them all from a single managment console regardless of the deployment model or the number of modules a customer chooses to employ.
“Hybrid security solutions that provide a unified platform of SaaS and on-premise deliver a higher degree of security while addressing the needs of organizations with decentralized offices and mobile workers, when compared to a single deployment model,” Brian Burke, security analyst with IDC Research, said in a statement.