Blue Coat Systems, a player in the Application Delivery Networking space, has unveiled its vision for the Application Delivery Network, an application-aware infrastructure that provides the visibility, acceleration and security required to optimise and secure the delivery of business-enabling applications across the distributed enterprise.
“Today’s distributed enterprises understand that fast, reliable access to information is critical to success, yet they struggle to efficiently deliver business applications to distributed users across the network,” said Brian NeSmith, president and chief executive officer, Blue Coat Systems.
The Application Delivery Network: Visibility, Acceleration and Security
The Application Delivery Network works in conjunction with the packet-based network as an optimised infrastructure that provides the in-depth application intelligence required to securely and deliver business-critical applications.
The Blue Coat Application Delivery Network Infrastructure combines application monitoring, WAN optimisation and Secure Web Gateway technologies to provide intelligence about the applications and Web content running across the distributed enterprise network.
Application Visibility: Discover, Classify and Prioritise
Centralised visibility into application traffic and Web content enables network managers to efficiently monitor application performance and realign network resources with business goals. Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances classify more than 600 internal, external, customised, real-time and encrypted applications and monitor more than 100 application attributes. Blue Coat ProxySG appliances identify users and assess and classify Web content, including malicious threats.
Application Acceleration: Internal, External and Real-time Applications
Utilising application intelligence, Blue Coat ProxySG appliances accelerate centralised internal, external, encrypted, customised and video applications by applying protocol optimisation, object and byte caching, compression and bandwidth management. ProxySG appliances substantially reduce bandwidth consumption on the Wide Area Network (WAN) or across an enterprise Internet gateway, resulting in lower operational expenses.
Application Security: Proactive Layers of Defense
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 analyses several 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.