Blue Coat PacketShaper Appliances To Provide Visibility Into Twitter

Blue Coat Systems, a player in the Application Delivery Networking space, has added Twitter to the applications that Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances can discover, monitor and control. PacketShaper appliances enable enterprises to gain a comprehensive understanding of how employees utilise social networking tools and set policies to manage them.

“Understanding which social media tools are being utilised and how employees are using them is valuable information that helps network administrators set and enforce corporate policies,” said Steve House, director of Product Marketing at Blue Coat Systems. “Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances provide the visibility, actionable intelligence and control that enable enterprises to fully realise the value of their network investments.”

According to statistics from Nielsen NetView, there were seven million unique visitors to Twitter in February 2009, an increase of 1,374 percent from February 2008. This increase is consistent with continued growth in enterprise adoption of social networking tools. According to a survey by Awareness, 75 percent of employees were already using social networking sites for business purposes in 2008, an increase of 15 percent from 2007. The same survey also found that 61 percent of businesses use social networking to improve communication and collaboration.

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Using Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances, enterprises have the ability to see and control Twitter, which allows them to set appropriate IT policies to either enable or control collaboration. PacketShaper appliances can identify and classify more than 600 applications and can monitor more than 100 metrics per application session. This visibility enables network managers to limit the impact of recreational applications and optimise the performance of business applications by applying granular controls such as bandwidth guarantees, limits, prioritisation and other quality of service mechanisms.

With the visibility provided by PacketShaper appliances, network managers can set and enforce corporate IT policies to optimise and accelerate business applications and block or limit non-business applications. Blue Coat offers visibility into the performance and security of applications running across the network, providing enterprises with the control they need to enhance business productivity and respond to changing business requirements.

Availability

The new software plug-in for Twitter is available immediately and is free of charge to customers with a current maintenance agreement.