Websense Channel

Websense Ranked as Top Security Vendor in CRN Report

Ross Baker — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 07:55:00 GMT

The CRN Vendor Report recently recognised Websense as one of the top vendors in a first-of-its-kind survey of the channel. The independent study surveyed 298 CRN UK readers including VARS, solution integrators, distributors and MSPs. Websense scored higher than any other security vendor with an above industry average. We ranked in the top 20 percentile for our overall performance.

Respondents were asked to evaluate 48 different vendors on various different points including product quality, accreditation, training and sales and technical support. It's fantastic to be featured so highly in an independent report where people can air their grievances in anonymity. Below is some particularly fantastic partner feedback from the report:

"The Websense channel team is more efficient and proactive than any other I have worked with."
"The Websense channel team do a high-touch job and their commitment and-for me-their support for their individual accounts is at present unrivalled."
"We benefit greatly from our close relationship with Websense. Together we have strengthened our position and of many resellers in the security market."

Our channel partners are on the frontline. Each day they help educate customers on the evolution of security technology and provide companies with the right protection. It's clear from the feedback that Websense has stepped up to the plate when it comes to helping partners increase their revenue.

We are constantly working to build on our TRITON security solutions. Our innovation enables our channel partners to set themselves apart and position themselves as a differentiator. We take pride in providing innovative products that businesses require and being a flexible vendor that makes doing business easy. We are always looking to find solutions that make life easier for everyone. Part of that process is excelling in account management, highlighted in the report as a particular Websense benefit, to produce smoother and more efficient sales cycles.

Whilst flexibility is a part of our culture, other channel initiatives at Websense include delivering world-class sales, marketing, training and technical support through the Websense Partner Program. Our aim is to empower our partners with training and accreditation to help negotiate better margins and profits.

Have any questions about the Websense channel? Feel free to leave a comment below or visit https://www.websense.com/content/websense-partner-programs.aspx

Fiaaz Walji Named CRN 2013 Channel Chief

Kathryn Lodato — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:05:00 GMT

UBM Tech Channel's CRN 2013 Channel Chiefs has named Websense's Fiaaz Walji to its prestigious list. This accolade recognizes executives directly responsible for driving channel sales and growth within their organization. These powerful leaders evangelize and defend the importance of the channel throughout the entire IT Industry.

As the Canadian country manager for Websense, Walji demonstrated channel leadership, partner dedication and outstanding customer experience commitment. Under his leadership, the company experienced year-over-year profitability and increased customer retention within Canada. Websense Canada also increased sales and technical headcount, training, and enhanced renewal and new business margins through its partner deal registration program.

"Recent high-profile targeted attacks against news outlets underscore the need for a unified security solution that integrates security intelligence across web security, email security, data loss prevention and mobile security," said Walji. "Any company with IP is a target. Real-time defenses, combined with unified security technology, are essential to stop multi-stage attacks and prevent data loss. I'm honored to be part of this community of leaders recognized for bringing security innovation and excellence to our partners and their customers."

Savvy security partners recognize that criminal advances in developing highly targeted multi-stage attacks has increased the need for better visibility and correlation of events across the IT infrastructure. The better an organization can piece together the warning signs of a multi-stage attack, the faster it can stop or even prevent data theft. Fiaaz has been instrumental in educating the Websense partner community on the latest threats-like those detailed in the 2013 Websense Threat Report.

For more than 10 years, Channel Chiefs have been selected by the CRN editorial team based on channel experience, program innovations, channel-driven revenue and public support for the importance of IT channel sales.

Three Traditional Anti-Phishing Technologies That Are Failing Your Customers; The Role of the Partner in Fighting Spear Phishing, Part Two

Jason Woo — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 12:07:00 GMT

Spear-phishing attackers do plenty of recon about their targets to craft convincing email lures. But they've also refined their technological approach to do an end-around on the traditional anti-phishing technology that most channel partners have installed within customer environments. In fact, three of the most effective technologies at blocking most phishing attempts are now nearly useless against the latest types of targeted spear-phishing attacks.

Let's talk about why.

Sender Reputation

Until now, sender reputation has been a very reliable method of keeping most phishing mail from ever hitting inboxes because it's been able to identify those email addresses that are known to spew out spam or large volumes of email. Emails from addresses with a bad rep are automatically blocked. But spear-phish attackers are careful to send their messages from reputable email addresses and domains. If they don't have access to a reputable email address, they'll sometimes go as far as attacking a legitimate email website or server in order to commandeer an address with a good reputation.

Antivirus

Antivirus is another heavily leveraged technology to block out traditional phishing attacks. While AV is very good at detecting and blocking those files that contain known viruses, most spear-phishers don't depend on attached known viruses to infect victims. Most advanced malware is not binary-based. Instead, it really takes the approach of directing users to a webpage that hosts malicious code. Because no known signatures exist for these types of attacks, antivirus just doesn't work to protect against them.

Lexical Analysis

Your customers may also depend heavily upon lexical analysis to block phishing attempts. This type of first-line analytical filtering takes a look at the body of the email seeking specific words or specific word patterns that are commonly found and associated with spam or phishing. But spear phishers seem to have hired proof-readers: they've tightened their email construction and made it convincing enough to fool not just the lexical analysis filters but the users themselves.

While all three of these technologies are still important as a first layer of defense - they tend to block out 99 percent of attacks using old-school phishing techniques - they're leaving that dangerous one percent to land directly into users' inboxes.

We believe that partners need to get in front of their customers to advocate for a more advanced technological response to the spearphishing threat. While the previous three technologies may be falling down on the job, there's another trio of technologies that can augment the defense and protect customers from targeted phishing attempts. They are:

Web Intelligence Within The Email Security Gateway: real-time web analytics and an up-to-date database of known good and malicious websites stop converged web and email threats from victimizing users;
Point-of-Click Threat Analysis: dynamic web code that might be benign when the message goes through the email filter but changes to malicious a few days or hours later can be combated by putting emails with URLs in a sandbox and analyzing them at the time the user clicks on the link
Real-Time Analysis of Data Transmission: by analyzing all outbound data to automatically block, quarantine or encrypt sensitive data, you can prevent slow and steady leaks of important information

To learn more about the role these technologies play in stopping spearphishing, I encourage partners to download our whitepaper on Defending Against Today's Targeted Phishing Attacks.

Finally, partners should think carefully about their role in building awareness among customer decision makers and their end users about spearphishing. Technology is crucial, but education is just as important. And it is an integral part of the channel's contribution to battle spearphishing out in the wild. So important, in fact, that we'll dedicate the third part of our blog series to the topic of training.

Predicting Partner Patterns for 2013

Kurt Mills — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 07:50:00 GMT

You may have recently read the 2013 security predictions from the Websense Security Labs. I wanted to add a few specific to the channel world. The coming year holds a lot of promise for security partners seeking to kickstart their businesses through new services and offerings. As the channel gears up for 2013, the chatter we're hearing from our partner base at Websense points to the belief that success will stem from greater focus on successful vendor relationships, flexibility in deployment offerings and more creativity in how partners deliver their solutions. Given that, we predict the following trends to intensify next year.

Partners will consolidate their vendor roster: The partners I talk to are finding that they can't succeed as well with numerous vendors anymore. They're looking to be more focused with fewer vendors. If there's three functions they don't want customers to deal with three different security management reporting consoles.
Customer demands are driving partners to require more flexibility from vendors: Customers are becoming more diversified in how they run their business-it's not a one-size fits all situation anymore. They might want an on-premise security solution at their HQ but a cloud-based solution for their mobile workforce. Partners want to accommodate, which means they're looking for vendors who provide the flexibility of doing on-premise, cloud or hybrid deployments for any given solution.
Partners are looking for increased routes to market: You're going to continue to see partners diversify from not only reselling, but to leveraging the cloud and doing managed services. customers are growing more evolved in how they handle their networks, the applications they work with and the threats they face, that magnifies the importance of providing a flexible set of services and products.

What things do you expect in the channel for 2013? Leave a comment below and let's talk it through.

The Role of the Partner in Fighting Spear-Phishing, Part One: From Shotgun To Rifle Shot - Spear-Phishing's Evolution Hits The Mark

Jason Woo — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 16:16:00 GMT

Anytime security executives speak up in unanimity, it pays for security channel partners to listen. Last month Websense CSO Jason Clark spoke with a representative sample of his peers - 20 CSOs from top U.S. companies - and a resounding 100 percent of them named spear-phishing as one of their top concerns.

So what's the deal with spear-phishing, some partners may wonder? Haven't we worked with our customers to largely beat back the spam and phishing problems within their environments?

Well, yes and no. See, while the traditional anti-phishing technologies and services that partners have delivered to customers has effectively neutralized a huge volume of phishing attacks, the risk around the small proportion of those left unblocked has actually increased dramatically. The reason why is because when it comes to phishing the bad guys have essentially switched from hunting with shotguns to rifles.

Scattershot Aim: It used to be that the spammers and scammers of the world would do well sending a scattershot of blanket emails to the masses. Vaguely worded and crudely crafted, these messages only needed to trick a slim percentage of the millions of recipients to enter personal information into fake forms or open an executable file to give bad guys access to their personal information or control of their machines for future attacks. Even a scant 1 percent success rate among 10 million recipients would yield 100,000 victims for the bad guys. However, the advent of blocking technology and some very basic user education went a long way toward reducing the effectiveness of these unevolved attacks.

Sniping Bigger Targets: But even as partners and customers worked with tech vendors to institute technology that blocks that scattershot approach, the hackers of the world were coming to realize two things:

Stealing personal information one at a time might be mildly profitable, but the real black market money is in corporate data stores-not only large repositories of customer data for massively scaled ID theft but also trade secrets that can be sold for beaucoup bucks to nation states or unethical competitors
If you want to steal information from a company, it is a lot more effective to set your phishing sights on one or two juicy inside targets by crafting an email lure perfectly tailored to their interests than it is to throw out random messages looking for any takers

These "Eureka!" realizations, combined with the bad guys' own advancements in technology to evade our first few generations of phishing protections has triggered a spear-phishing evolution that partners need to prepare their customers to defend against.

Are you and your customers aware that:

hackers might do months of background research on a particular spear-phishing target through social networking sites, online searches and more to find out about their hobbies and what groups they're affiliated with
hackers will find loopholes or vulnerabilities in legitimate websites to serve up malware that can be downloaded on victim's machines just by visiting them
hackers will take over legitimate email websites to take advantage of their 'good' reputation to make it through certain email filters
many attackers try to trick less senior employees with spear-phishing attacks to leapfrog from their machines to further attacks on valuable network resources

If you don't know the extent these hackers are going to spear-phish your customers, now is the time to learn more about how technology approaches and education awareness campaigns need to change to keep up with this new strain of targeted attacks. Keep your eyes peeled for parts two and three of this series of blogs to get a better understanding of effective responses that you can recommend to customers facing the spear-phishing threat.

While you are waiting for the next part in this series, why not take our Operation Spear-Phish challenge?

Putting Postini Out To Pasture

Kathryn Lodato — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 15:40:00 GMT

One of the most dreaded moments in many channel partners' business lives is when a long-time vendor retires a product or service that customers are still buying and renewing. These type of vendor announcements tend to push the 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it" crowd out of inertia and can put a large customer segment at risk if the partner doesn't handle the situation well.

But these product cancellations don't necessarily have to be agony. In fact, they can be a huge opportunity to migrate once-stubborn customers to a superior product that they would have never considered while still holding a torch for that old vendor. There's nothing like a product retirement to get valued customers out of a rut and set up with more modernized solutions. Sell the alternative right and you can alleviate pain points customers didn't think were addressable before.

We foresee this exact scenario will unfold within the IT security world as the channel deals with the fallout from Google's retirement of its Postini email filtering product and its plan to migrate these services over to Google Apps. As one email marketing blogger, Derek Harding, put it:

Does this mean that companies will continue to use the Postini functionality with its limited visibility and non-existent sender support but within a Google Apps environment connected to their existing Exchange environment? It certainly sounds that way.

The truth is that Postini never really performed up to customer standards anyway. The most recent Gartner survey results on email security showed it scored low in customer satisfaction. Which means this is the perfect time for savvy partners to swoop in and displace this dead product with something that better suits the protection needs of organizations beset with advanced attacks like spearphishing and multi-stage malware attacks.

These threats are a very real concern to most channel customers today. Recently, Websense's CSO Jason Clark hosted a round-table discussion with 20 CSOs from top companies around the U.S. In a straw poll conducted during that meeting, he found that consensus was unanimous that spear phishing is a big concern AND that there was a high likelihood that their CEO would probably click on an infected spearphishing link if the email got through.

Given the threat and the Postini opportunity, Websense has already put boots on the ground to help support partners in this displacement opportunity. We've established an email campaign kit and support materials to help guide partners with ideal messaging as they approach these customers and prospects with plans to utilize Websense TRITON in their email protection schemes. Interested Websense partners can find these materials on the partner portal. We believe that taking advantage of these resources can prove to show how valuable vendor product retirements really can be to smart partners.

Websense Wins Award For Work Through Distributors

Frank Solano — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 13:06:00 GMT

Websense's efforts to support our partners through better distribution relationships is not only reaping the reward of increased sales—it's also gaining accolades from thought leaders in the channel community. Last week, I was proud to accept a Gold Star Award from the Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC) on behalf of Websense channel partners and the company itself.

A non-profit dedicated to the promotion of distributors' issues to vendors and partners, GTDC gives away awards annually to honor vendors who have seen an increase in year-over-year billings through distributors, using NPD Data Tracker to chart sales billings by product vendor. This is no judgment-call award; it is based purely on performance.

Clearly, Websense has stepped up to the plate when it comes to helping partners grow their businesses through the support of distributors. We attribute the visible success of this award to the sometimes not-so-visible work we've done to foster a better distribution environment at our company in recent years. Over the past three years we've added two new distributors to our ranks and have dedicated resources to push more business through that distribution pipeline. And we've established the communication channels between us, distributors and partners necessary to enable success.

My role at Websense is to support all of the distributors we work with in North America. So I'm a little biased when I say this, but I firmly believe that partners gain a ton of flexibility when they bill through distributors. Just before the GTDC summit in which the group gave away its awards this year, GTDC CEO Tim Curran was interviewed by Channelnomics editor Chris Gonsalves. In that chat, he talked about distributor's continued success in the face of naysayers who've claimed for years that distribution is going to disappear some day:

Over the last 10 years, every time the industry goes through a refresh, pundits question whether distribution will survive. Well, we not only have survived, we have flourished and remain healthy and strong.

I attribute that resiliency to the benefits of distribution that I promote every day. Working through distribution offers resellers access to a number of financing programs to help them close opportunities. Disties offer boosted sales support to help partners manage customers, bundle products and affordably ship well outside their home territory. And distributors give partners access to a more robust suite of services and technical support that can help sweeten a deal with additional expertise beyond what the partner would be able to offer through in-house resources.

Multi-Stage Attacks Drive Customers to Call for Better Visibility

Kathryn Lodato — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 14:17:00 GMT

Savvy security partners recognize that criminal advances in developing highly coordinated multi-channel attacks against web, email and network data repositories has intensified the need for better visibility and correlation of events across the IT infrastructure. The better an organization can piece together all of the warning signs of a multi-stage attack, the faster it can stop or even prevent data theft and data leakages.

While this has been a major philosophical driver behind the security information and event management (SIEM) market, the fact is that many organizations still struggle so much with the complexity of SIEM systems that they can't harness the correlation power these systems offer. In fact, an InformationWeek Report out earlier this year said that 44 percent of organizations say that their biggest challenge with SIEM systems are their complexity.

"In most cases, they're really not fully utilized or even half utilized. They're often installed in a basic configuration and put in maintenance, and then not much more beyond that," the report's author, Dean Francis, told Network Computing recently.

A recent blog post by SIEM expert and Gartner analyst Anton Chuvakin noted that without certain processes, including an incident response process and a SIEM tuning process, these SIEM deployments have a high rate of failure. One of the process suggestions he made stood out to me:

"If you don’t have some kind of suspicious indicator triage process that tasks somebody with deciding that an incident should be declared OR that some rule in SIEM should be adjusted, is also very unlikely that your SIEM effort will succeed," he wrote.

The relevance to partners is that, whether they use SIEM or not, customers need a way to identify those first-order triage events. Essentially they need a quick way to correlate warning signs to take action to staunch the bleeding before investigating more deeply within SIEM. Clearly, any partner that has some sort of technology platform at its disposal that could simplify that triage process will have the advantage in the market.

That's where Websense comes in. One of the most critical advances in the TRITON security platform was the addition of a unified security forensics dashboard that brings together easy-to-decipher statistics and visualizations of information pumped out from web, email and data security infrastructure. It's a huge differentiator for partners helping customers prepare for and gain deeper insight into any multi-stage attacks. And for service partners it offers a big opportunity for them to start offering a deeper breadth of services without severely straining their own staffing resources in order to regularly understand and manage risks within customer environments.

Websense Woman of the Channel: Dee Dee Acquista

Kurt Mills — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 22:56:00 GMT

Last month, CRN honored our very own Dee Dee Acquista in the 2012 Women of the Channel Awards. It's a well-deserved award for a very capable channel leader--someone who I believe has been an integral part of improving partner relations here at Websense. When I came to Websense a couple of years ago, I challenged Dee Dee to continue to evolve her ability to manage her business and she's certainly stepped up to the plate. Her ability to develop her skills to not just be able to manage people, but also understand the programmatic and operational aspects of the channel, as well as recruit and retain key partners, all contribute to her capabilities as a well-rounded channel leader. It's why I promoted her to Senior Director of North American Channel Sales and why you, the partners, have seen a lot more of her over the past year. Dee Dee has done a great job instituting a tighter alignment between our internal sales organization, her team and the partner community to minimize conflict and maximize synergy from the partner base. She's also driving what I call a value-based based and performance driven channel to help partners improve their strategies and profitability with Websense. Not surprisingly, under her helm her North American partners saw double-digit growth in 2011. Anyone who has been in this business long enough understands that you can't be a successful channel leader by hoping and praying everyone knows what's going on-you've got to operate transparently and be very visible to the partner community with everything you do. It's a concept Dee Dee certainly grasps and the reason why our partners will continue to see her as a notable voice of Websense channel operations.

The Vendor Switcheroo – 3 Key Factors to Consider

Kathryn Lodato — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 08:12:00 GMT

Justifying a switch in vendor loyalties to customers can be one of the biggest challenges a partner can face. After spending so much time convincing them that Vendor A was the right solution for their needs, changing direction and now recommending Vendor B can leave some customers with questions and concerns.

Not only is there the fear of being tagged as indecisive, there’s also the matter of convincing customers to dump an ecosystem or platform that you once argued for so earnestly. More critically, though, customers who bought into that pitch will be hesitant to chalk up their investment as a sunk cost. They’re going to think twice about the new platform, wondering first if it is being sold on the capricious whim of a partner motivated only by its own self-interest.

There are still plenty of valid situations where partners need to grit their teeth and power through the process. Money can be a factor if a vendor makes it unfavorable for you to continue the relationship, but even more important is the well being of your customer base.

Sometimes internal situations shift within a vendor organization. A vendor once known for cutting-edge technology can turn into a laggard after scaling back R&D investments. An organization with a high-degree of customer service can grow out-of-touch following massive rounds of layoffs. And a leading vendor can lose its way when an acquisition or a bout of musical chairs at the senior executive table wipes out the institutional memory.

The question partners need to ask themselves is whether it is worth “saving face” at the cost of sticking with a vendor that’s not serving the customer well anymore?

At Websense, we’ve witnessed new partners ask and answer ‘no’ to this question as they transition their business away from Blue Coat and over to Websense. They’re deciding they prefer the Websense commitment to research and development, leading technology, stability of executive leadership and level of staffing infrastructure - all of which act as a more powerful backstop for effective partner-led customer service.

Through this process, I’m finding that the success factors for partners navigating the transition with customers typically stem from delicate but straightforward communication. No matter what industry or vendor, I think the following three communication pointers are critical to hit on when communicating the direction change decision to a customer:

Rely On Metrics: Nothing speaks louder than numbers. Share the statistics that helped you make your reasoned decision in the first place. For example, if the new vendor develops security intelligence based on 10x more users than the old one, that’s a valuable proofpoint. Ask your vendor for help with data and assets that support your decision.
Highlight What’s Different: If you’re worried customers will think you led them astray in the first place, be sure to walk them through a compare-and-contrast exercise of what’s changed since the initial sale. Point to changes in leadership, recent layoffs, M&A activity and lack of upgrades as evidence of changes outside of your control. These factors will support your argument and again show how you came to your decision.
Ease Customers Through Graceful Transition: Position yourself as a business consultant by leveraging your knowledge of the customer’s business and their infrastructure to help them decide when the time is right to make the vendor switch. If it is a security deal, walk them through a risk assessment to figure out whether their risk appetite allows them to stick with the outmoded technology until the upgrade time they initially targeted. If necessary, direct them to creative financing, new SaaS or hybrid purchasing models or just look for ways to slowly upgrade bits-and-pieces of infrastructure rather than performing a rip-and-replace.

By following these three tips, partners are more likely to successfully navigate the tricky process of introducing a new vendor recommendation. Do it with forthright candor and you’ll not only help your customer improve their technology infrastructure, you’ll gain their respect as a trusted advisor.