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Blue Coat Accelerates Application Delivery Across the Enterprise Wide Area Network
21 March 2006 Blue Coat(R) Systems (Nasdaq: BCSI), the leader in secure content and application delivery, today announced its new MACH5 technology for acceleration of applications across the enterprise Wide Area Network (WAN). MACH5 adds a framework of acceleration technologies to the latest software for Blue Coat appliances, and it is the first solution to accelerate both internal and externally-hosted applications that use encrypted SSL communication.
"Enterprises have to take a strategic view to address the acceleration of all distributed applications -- present and future," said Andrew McKinney, director of technical services, Richardson Partners Financial Limited, a firm that specializes in managing the financial affairs of high net worth Canadians and their families. "The fact is many internal and all externally sourced business-critical applications use SSL communication, so it is imperative for an acceleration solution to speed SSL-encrypted traffic as well as Web, file services and email."
Introducing MACH5 -- Multiprotocol Accelerated Caching Hierarchy
The MACH5 patent-pending framework of acceleration technologies is designed to accelerate all key enterprise applications, including: Web and secure Web applications (SSL), file services, email/Microsoft Exchange, video-live streaming and on-demand, and any TCP-based application. Since MACH5 is integrated with the Blue Coat platform, it enables organizations to manage all of their user/application interactions -- to stop undesirable applications, throttle less important applications and accelerate critical applications, even when encrypted within SSL.
The MACH5 framework can apply its five acceleration techniques appropriately across the range of key enterprise applications. The technologies include:
-- Bandwidth management -- prioritizes traffic for a particular
application by ordering of traffic and the amount of bandwidth
allocated to an application
-- Protocol optimization -- takes "chatty," "request and wait" protocols
that are inefficient over the WAN -- including Common Internet File
System (CIFS), Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI),
HTTP, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and HTTPS -- and makes them
more efficient. Optimization includes sending in parallel those
communications usually sent serially
-- Object caching -- stores a copy of commonly requested or anticipated
objects locally so that they do not have to be transmitted more than
once across the WAN; objects can be updated when a change occurs with
only the changed portion sent over the WAN
-- Byte caching -- Blue Coat's unique technology for highly efficient data
reduction and caching which is based on seeing repetitive patterns in
sub-application-object bits of information; these patterns can be
represented by a token, and only the token has to traverse the WAN.
Byte caching can represent multiple megabytes of data with just a few
bytes. A token of just a few bytes can represent a block as large as
64 KB.
-- Compression -- applies an established algorithm to remove extraneous or
predictable information from traffic before it is transmitted; the
information is reconstituted at the destination using the same
algorithm
Acceleration for SSL Encrypted Applications
SSL encrypted sessions represent a significant -- often over 50 percent for some companies -- and growing portion of enterprise application traffic. Organizations are encrypting internal applications with SSL, and there is a rapidly growing movement towards outsourcing many critical business applications, such as customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, financial and procurement applications, travel booking, human resources/benefits and expense management, and more. All of these external applications must communicate with enterprise users through the use of SSL over the public Internet. With MACH5 technology, Blue Coat appliances are the only solution that can control and accelerate all SSL traffic.
"Branch office application performance is a real problem today and is growing in complexity and need," said Joe Skorupa, research director, enterprise network infrastructure, Gartner. "Besides accelerating file sharing, email and browser-based enterprise applications, solutions must be able to accelerate the growing amount of mission-critical secure Web sessions encrypted by SSL."
Acceleration for Video Applications
The use of live (streaming) video and video on-demand is growing for most organizations, principally for e-learning/training purposes. Most organizations with a high degree of employee churn and/or regulatory oversight have significant and expensive training needs. Many are turning to online video to meet those needs but quickly run into network capacity issues. Blue Coat appliances are used in many enterprise networks to accelerate both streaming and video on demand applications, applying stream caching and protocol optimization (e.g. pre-population and transparent stream splitting) to accelerate the user experience and offload the network and servers.
Integrated Policy Control Eliminates Unwanted and Harmful Traffic
Blue Coat appliances with MACH5 integrate Blue Coat's well-established strengths in security and policy control with application acceleration. The solution is unique in its ability to significantly reduce bandwidth by eliminating unwanted or harmful traffic, such as spyware, viruses, peer-to-peer (P2P) applications and other unauthorized communication applications, including those that are encrypted, such as Skype. Conventional acceleration solutions lack the ability to control malware or unwanted traffic and may actually accelerate it. In addition, without being able to assess SSL encrypted sessions, conventional solutions have to pass all encrypted traffic through and lack any ability to accelerate the traffic.
Integrated Web Security as Branch Offices Migrate to "Direct to the Net"
Today most branch offices run their Internet connections over the WAN and through the Internet gateway at the headquarters location. As branch offices begin to evolve these "backhaul" WAN connections to a direct connection to the Internet, Web security and policy control become increasingly important. The same Blue Coat appliances deployed in the branch for acceleration of applications can also guard against viruses, spyware and other malware while providing consistent policy control of applications and content.
"By 2009 we predict that half of all branch offices will have direct Internet connections," said Mark Fabbi, vice president, enterprise communications, Gartner. "As branch offices become directly connected to the Internet, they need the same levels of Web security as headquarters."
"Blue Coat accelerates the full range of key business applications, including those encrypted by SSL," said Steve Mullaney, vice president of marketing for Blue Coat Systems. "Since SSL sessions represent such an important portion of enterprise application traffic, any acceleration solution is incomplete if it cannot also boost mission-critical SSL traffic. In addition, organizations need to consider a solution that integrates complete acceleration with Web security and policy control for the evolving needs of branch and remote offices."
About Blue Coat Systems
Blue Coat secures Web communications and accelerates business applications across the distributed enterprise. Blue Coat's family of appliances provides intelligent points of control enabling IT organizations to optimize security and performance for all users and applications. More than 25,000 Blue Coat appliances are deployed in enterprise and service provider organizations throughout the world. Blue Coat is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and can be reached at (408) 220-2200 or http://www.bluecoat.com.
FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS: The statements contained in this press release that are not purely historical are forward-looking statements, including statements regarding Blue Coat Systems' expectations, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future, and including statements regarding the capabilities and expected performance of Blue Coat Systems' products. All forward-looking statements included in this press release are based upon information available to Blue Coat Systems as of the date hereof, and Blue Coat Systems assumes no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These and other risks relating to Blue Coat Systems' business are set forth in Blue Coat Systems' most recently filed Form 10-Q for the quarter ended January 31, 2006 and Form 10-K for the year ended April 30, 2005, and other reports filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
NOTE: All trademarks, trade names or service marks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
Source: prnewswire
All trademarks and copyrighted information contained herein are the property of their respective owners.
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