So you think you’re running a hybrid cloud/on-premises security solution. Uh-uh. No way. At least not if you believe web security software vendor Websense, who says their new TRITON unified security platform redefines “hybrid services.”

TRITON itself is a combination of Websense’s existing web, e-mail, and data leakage protection products, all controlled from a central dashboard. Rather than just “integrate the invoice,” as Websense Director of Product Marketing Dave Meizlik puts it, they focused on really unifying policy management.

When a TRITON user sets an administrator policy, that policy is enforced across every single server, desktop, and security appliance, Meizlik says. It may sound like a minor selling point, but as any VAR who’s tried to get different security solutions from different vendors to play nice and talk to each other can attest, TRITON has the potential to disrupt this market (if it works as advertised).

As far as the hybrid aspect of TRITON, Meizlik says that they have an industry first in the form of their TruHybrid platorm. According to him, what most security software vendors call “hybrid” is really just “cloud lookup,” which means that the product just sends data from the local device to the cloud to be analyzed and then the result is sent back.

By contrast, TRITON and TruHybrid do everything in the cloud, whether the end-user is using Websense protection as software-as-a-service or on a traditional license. What this means is that a VAR can provide a solution that both provides the lower TCO of a cloud model and the all-in-one policy rollout of TRITON.

Websense seems to think that they have a hit on their hands – apparently, they trained their resellers on TRITON at their recent partner conference, and Meizlik says response was tremendously positive. Only time will tell if this unified approach to security and policy management is the game-changer they clearly want it to be.