Blue Coat Outlines its Application Delivery Networking Vision

Blue Coat Systems unveiled its vision for the Application Delivery Network, an application-aware infrastructure that provides the visibility, acceleration and security required to optimize and secure the delivery of business-enabling applications across the distributed enterprise.


The Application Delivery Network integrates visibility, acceleration and security technologies to provide the in-depth application intelligence required to securely and efficiently deliver business-critical applications. Specifically, the Blue Coat Application Delivery Network Infrastructure combines application monitoring, WAN optimization and Secure Web Gateway technologies to provide unmatched intelligence about the applications and Web content running across the distributed enterprise network.


Visibility: To provide centralized visibility into application traffic and Web content, Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances classify more than 600 internal, external, customized, real-time and encrypted applications and monitor more than 100 application attributes. With this application intelligence, PacketShaper appliances can apply bandwidth and quality of service controls based on corporate IT policies. Blue Coat ProxySG appliances identify users and assess and classify Web content, including malicious threats. With this visibility into Web content, ProxySG appliances can apply a variety of controls based on policy.


Acceleration: Utilizing application intelligence, Blue Coat ProxySG appliances accelerate centralized internal, external, encrypted, customized and video applications by applying protocol optimization, object and byte caching, compression and bandwidth management. ProxySG appliances substantially reduce bandwidth consumption on the WAN or across an enterprise Internet gateway, resulting in lower operational expenses.


Security: Blue Coat ProxySG appliances assess Web content and applications in conjunction with Blue Coat WebFilter software and Blue Coat ProxyAV appliances. Through its cloud-based WebPulse service, Blue Coat analyzes more than 150 million Web requests per day to build a comprehensive profile of Web content. This Web intelligence informs the Blue Coat layered defenses to prevent malicious threats from compromising application security or performance.


Blue Coat is offering professional consulting to help enterprises design, deploy and manage the Application Delivery Network.


Separately, Blue Coat announced a new version of Blue Coat IntelligenceCenter software and a new software release for its Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances to extend the application visibility and control inherent in its solutions for Application Delivery Networks (see separate release today from Blue Coat on Application Delivery Networks). The Blue Coat IntelligenceCenter application monitoring product now provides a real-time Application Performance Dashboard that shows enterprise application performance at any location for distributed users. .
http://www.bluecoat.com