Home >> Solutions >> Content Distribution >> BlueCoat

Blue Coat secures Web communications and accelerates business applications across the distributed enterprise. Blue Coat’s family of appliances and client-based solutions – deployed in branch offices, Internet gateways, end points, and data centers – provide intelligent points of policy-based control enabling IT organizations to optimize security and accelerate performance for all users and applications. Blue Coat has installed more than 8,000 customers worldwide and is ranked #1 by IDC in the Secure Content and Application Delivery market.

Today’s enterprise often has no clear boundaries. Employees are distributed across various branch offices and are typically connected via the corporate WAN, but remote/mobile Internet access is also a necessity. In addition, customers, partners, and suppliers can all leverage the Internet for authorized, “on-demand” access to the enterprise – regardless of their physical location. Within this "boundaryless" enterprise (or any type distributed organization), applications are hosted in the main corporate data center(s) or, increasingly, applications are hosted by 3rd party organizations outside the company.

Collectively, this creates three distinct challenges for IT organizations:

• Security – IT must make the Web safe for business, blocking Internet security threats and inappropriate content, while granting authorized users access to necessary applications and content.
• Performance – IT must strive to optimize performance of critical business applications – such as e-mail, file systems, multimedia applications, and Web applications (including encrypted SSL applications) being delivered to remote users in branch offices, as well as mobile users.
  
  
• Control – To address the requirements above, IT must have granular visibility and policy-based control capabilities to ensure that the business is providing superior security and performance for all users and critical applications.
  
  Blue Coat appliances and software technology solutions help IT organizations secure Web communications and accelerate delivery of business applications for all users across the distributed enterprise - including Internet gateways, branch offices, data centers, and even individual end points. Blue Coat appliances function as intelligent points of control wherever users and applications are connected to the network, and provide these important capabilities.
  
  
• Security – Unmatched ability to secure Web communications – filter inappropriate content, block spyware, scan for viruses, and even discover malicious content inside encrypted SSL tunnels. In addition, Blue Coat works with all leading authentication systems to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive content. As a result of all these features, the threat of security breaches via the Web is minimized.
  
  
• Performance – Blue Coat’s ability to accelerate delivery of business applications is a result of its MACH5 technology (Multi-protocol Acceleration and Caching Hierarchy). MACH5 delivers five critical performance enhancement capabilities: bandwidth management, protocol optimization, byte caching, predictive object caching, and compression. Collectively, MACH5 allows IT organizations to optimize application performance and utilization of costly bandwidth for remote users across the distributed enterprise. The result is LAN-like application performance over the WAN, with significant overall performance after deploying Blue Coat appliances powered with MACH5 technology.
  
  
• Control – Integrated, centrally-managed, policy-based control to enforce individual and enterprise-wide security and performance policies for all Web users and applications. This includes more than 500 policies associated with who, what, when, where, and how users and applications communicate with each other – regardless of their physical location.
  
  
• Proxy technology – Blue Coat appliances function as proxies between users and applications for all inbound and outbound Web sessions. As such, the appliances become a termination point – and therefore an extremely effective control point - between users and applications. This gives IT organizations granular control of security and performance issues associated with each Web user-application session.
  
  
• Scalability – As noted earlier, Blue Coat enables control points to be established wherever there is access to the Internet. Blue Coat solutions have been designed for branch offices, Internet gateways, data centers, and even down to individual end points. And, although these control points are distributed, they work together as a single, highly scalable system that enables IT to regain control of security and performance issues across the enterprise.