Control Internet usage

Coming under the category of an employee Internet management solution, Websense Enterprise v4.4 is an easy to install and set up software for companies. It allows analysis, management and reporting of your Internet traffic. It can easily integrate with your company’s existing firewalls and proxy servers.

Websense can run on Win NT/2000, Sun Solaris or Red Hat Linux. We tested it on a Win 2000 Server with MS ISA server as the proxy. The installation and integration were quite simple. It has three components–a server, manager and a database.

The server integrates with your proxy or firewall. The manager is for configuration and management, while the database is a large collection of over 3.5 million websites categorized into more than 75 categories. It’s a proprietary database, which has to be downloaded after installing Websense. Since new websites keep cropping up everyday, you can add them to this database as they come up.

Once the setup is running, you can configure it according to your company’s Internet access policy. It allows remote administration. You can add workstations, groups or networks into Websense and set the control levels. Policies can be assigned to individual clients or to all members of the network. The blocking options can be either based on specific times of a day or can you can also completely block sites. One can set browsing time and quotas for each category and also restrict access to certain sites after business hours.

Websense also comes with a Reporter and Log server to evaluate the amount and details of Internet usage in your company.

The reporter uses either MS SQL server or MSDE as the database engines to generate reports. For a large setup, it’s recommended to install the Reporter on a separate machine. The log server connects to the machine running Websense server and records all Internet activity into a log database. This is used by the reporter to generate reports in a variety of formats.

The Bottom Line: Websense is an easy way to control Internet access in your organization. Plus, it can be managed remotely and also generate all sorts of useful reports to understand your company’s Internet usage pattern.

Rashmi Sahu at PCQ Labs