Browsium Inc. was founded in 2010 to address the challenges of legacy enterprise web application compatibility during the critical shift from desktop-based to web-based business applications. The enterprise customer relationships and learnings from this period has enabled the company to evolve and grow its products, while our mission remains consistent: Enabling businesses to adapt to new requirements without being constrained by technical limitations of existing technology stacks.
As veterans of the ‘Browser Wars’ from decades ago, we learned there is more value in providing a platform for the entire browser marketplace rather than competing to be the browser of choice. Instead of developing yet another ‘enterprise browser’ attempting to supplant existing vendors, Browsium focuses on enterprise operational needs, delivering security insights and providing solutions to manage browser endpoints regardless of which browser platform an organization chooses to adopt.
As enterprises rapidly adopted browser-based applications, they faced significant challenges. Organizations quickly lost visibility into what users were accessing, what those applications do, performance and licensing data, as well as critical security information about those applications and the sites on which they were running. The browser as a platform for mission-critical applications changed the enterprise landscape, eliminating the extensive client telemetry information organizations had relied upon in traditional desktop environments. And now every line of business application is browser-based, with near-zero friction to adopting new applications, compounding the already challenging enterprise IT remit.
In 2015, Browsium released Proton to address these enterprise challenges by combining our expertise in desktop management and browser internals to deliver next-generation telemetry and management.
At the core, Proton provides the ability to ‘see’ inside the browser. Browsium products are browser-agnostic, providing data from Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and any Chromium-based enterprise browsers. This approach ensures that Proton can give a true enterprise-level view of all activity across the organization.
Proton delivers a comprehensive range of insights, from basic web activity reporting to page-level performance data, browser extensibility, and browser configuration information to support application rationalization. Additionally, Proton provides security insights to help organizations with compliance reporting and emerging security threats, as well as tools to aid in data loss prevention (DLP). Proton can also track and identify threats in browser extensions, a common vector for malicious activity and data loss.
Data exfiltration is a growing concern for organizations, and Proton is built to address browser-based scenarios that traditional gateway traffic analysis tools can’t adequately manage. Browser extensions are lightweight components that integrate with the browser to provide powerful capabilities for users. But they can also present security risks through either unintended or malicious use cases.
For organizations that extensively review and manually approve each extension and permissions for third-party websites, the security risks begin the moment they approve the use case. Proton keeps track of those approved extensions to monitor any changes to their configuration, permissions, or even when and where they are used. Similarly, understanding and tracking the ongoing daily operational data flow and activity details for third-party websites is crucial to ensure organizational security as well as regulatory and internal compliance.
Even before the browser became the most used application in the enterprise, organizations had to address tool duplication and redundancy. Previously, enterprise management tools could easily inventory installed application executables and provide detailed information about application distribution and usage. With a web-based infrastructure, this becomes nearly impossible without Proton.
The telemetry data Proton collects provides critical information about what applications users are accessing, enabling organizations to:
A forthcoming release will integrate artificial intelligence (AI) to help provide enhanced analysis and prediction solutions to disable and securely isolate extensions that violate company-defined parameters. Currently, organizations must decide between manual review and approval for each extension or permitting all extensions. Browsium tools can remove this hands-on management burden and enable the organization to set standard parameters, allowing the system to ensure compliance regardless of what users attempt to download and install. This flexibility is key for unmanaged and bring-your-own-device situations.
Browsium’s longer-term roadmap is to more seamlessly integrate our browser management tools into a single solution to deliver a simple approach to Discover » Plan » Act. By enabling organizations to leverage our current tools and build operational rulesets for user, application, and extension behaviors, Browsium will deliver a single-pane-of-glass solution for IT managers and 3rd party environment managers.
This unified platform will allow organizations to quickly and effortlessly manage browser-based end-user use cases for organizations from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of users. Leveraging rulesets and AI solutions, the management of the modern desktop environment will finally deliver the tools IT management needs for the browser-based world of today and tomorrow.
Browsium empowers enterprise IT with:
If you’re an enterprise IT manager and would like to talk with us about how we can improve the browser experience in your enterprise, please email us at [email protected] or fill out our contact form.
If you’re a systems integrator or reseller, please email us at [email protected] to learn about our partner program.
If you’re a member of the press, please email [email protected] to set up an interview.
