Texas Education Agency Standardizes on Watchfire to Manage Web Application Security and Compliance

Business Wire, Oct 11, 2006

As Hackers Get Smarter, Industry Regulations Become Stricter, and Websites Grow in Complexity, the Texas Education Agency Takes Proactive Steps to Help Ensure the Safety of its Users

WALTHAM, Mass. -- Watchfire, the market-leading provider of application vulnerability assessment software and services to help ensure the security and compliance of websites, today announced that the Texas Education Agency (TEA) has standardized on Watchfire[R] AppScan[R] Enterprise and Watchfire[R] WebXM[TM] to manage web application security and online compliance on the Texas Education Agency's more than 85,000 web pages.

The TEA provides leadership, guidance and resources to help more than 1,265 school districts and charter schools meet the educational needs of over 4.5 million Texas students. The TEA relies on its websites to provide online support for parents, educators and administrators. Many of its customer-facing applications, such as grant application forms and performance reporting, are used to perform secure transactions and collect sensitive information. Given the confidential nature of the information collected online, the size of the TEA websites and the large number of content contributors, TEA turned to Watchfire to help ensure the security and compliance of its web channel and reputation.

With increasing frequency, data theft and web application security incidents are being pushed to the front lines of security news. TEA is committed to providing secure online resources that help ensure the privacy of its students' and teachers' confidential information. TEA recognized that application security was a critical piece of the overall risk management landscape. With dozens of applications to manage, TEA needed to ensure it stayed ahead of potential security problems, and wanted to deploy automated enterprise-class solutions that could streamline the process of managing both web content and application security issues.

TEA selected Watchfire because AppScan Enterprise was the most proven solution, in addition to its comprehensive vulnerability assessment, remediation capabilities and its ability to cover other website compliance testing with the WebXM integration. TEA was impressed with the solution's ability to catch security defects that could expose them to risk, and with the platform's centralized application scanning control, user access permissions and security trending metrics. Given the complexity of TEA's web properties and the distributed nature of its content contributors, TEA also recognized that Watchfire's AppScan Enterprise supported a truly enterprise approach to managing these challenging issues.

Watchfire WebXM automates the process of auditing websites for privacy, quality and regulatory compliance issues across corporate web properties. TEA selected WebXM to help assess their level of compliance with current government and industry standards including the Texas Administrative Code. By using WebXM to monitor for these critical issues, TEA is addressing important web accessibility requirements and improving the overall experience for its users. TEA is also using WebXM to identify quality compliance issues, such as broken links, outdated content, broken forms, slow loading pages, poor searchability and usability problems. The reports generated help TEA identify problems and prioritize site repairs to encourage further adoption of its extensive online services.

Watchfire's comprehensive reports, dashboards and trending allow TEA's executive staff to monitor the agency's web presence as a whole. At the same time, it gives TEA the ability to parcel out customized reports and remediation tasks to the owners of individual content areas, and webmasters can then focus on technical details of the infrastructure, meeting TEA's needs on many different levels. The AppScan Enterprise and WebXM products bring TEA the level of automation and coordination they require to assist them in monitoring, managing and securing TEA's entire web application and web content infrastructure.

About Watchfire

Watchfire provides Online Risk Management software and services to help ensure the security and compliance of websites. More than 500 enterprises and government agencies, including AXA Financial, SunTrust, HSBC, Vodafone, Veterans Affairs and Dell rely on Watchfire to audit and report on issues impacting their online business. Watchfire has been the recipient of several industry honors including the HP/IAPP Privacy Innovation Award, InfoSecurity Product Guide's Hot Security Company 2006, Computerworld's Innovative Technology Award, and "Recommended" rating by Computer Reseller News. Watchfire was named by IDC as the worldwide market share leader in web application vulnerability assessment software. Watchfire's partners include IBM Global Services, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Sapient, Microsoft, Interwoven, WebTrends, EMC Documentum and Mercury. Watchfire is headquartered in Waltham, MA. For more information, please visit www.watchfire.com.