Blue Coat recently released three major announcements (summarize). In today’s webcast, we will focus on the second of these three announcements to give you a better understanding of the Business Assurance Technology.
What do we do?Solera Networks tells users what to look for on their networks, targeting these events in real-time, and giving users both context and content, improving and enhancing the enterprise’s ability to discover, investigate, and respond to Advanced Persistent Threats and Advanced Targeted Attacks. We are the best solution for delivering “Big Data for Information Security”
The use cases you see here are possible because of the layer of intelligence we provide—a whole host of reports, Geolocation, deep packet analysis, partner integrations, reputation services, threat feed, file analysis and much more. The DeepSee Analytics (the full packet capture, indexing, classification, etc.) enable the intelligence. At the base you have the engine that fuels it all delivered as software, appliances or as a virtual appliance.
Blue Coat recently released three major announcements (summarize). In today’s webcast, we will focus on the second of these three announcements to give you a better understanding of the Business Assurance Technology.
Blue Coat recently released three major announcements (summarize). In today’s webcast, we will focus on the second of these three announcements to give you a better understanding of the Business Assurance Technology.
Blue Coat value propositions are based on two main types of solutions:Web Security - Unified Security SolutionsNetworking and Optimization SolutionsCacheFlow
Customers are increasingly facing the user mandateWith personal devices intersecting with the corporate network and corporate assets, the businesses that are thinking about how to enable these users, are investing in BYOD initiatives. You heard steve talk about examples this morning about corporate mobility initiatives – whether for airline pilots, or sales reps, this initiatives requires the breadth of security and control on a corp network, extended out to mobile devices on any network. The mobility trend naturally drives initiatives around guest access – which presents entry point opportunities into some accounts, but also real revenue opportunities in areas such as health care, hospitality or retail, where secure high performing access for guests/customers is part of their business strategy. Protection and Application controls of course are the heart and sole of our offering – but what we continue to highlight is that ….click
But if we look behind the deployment choices, the customer requirement for the Extended Enterprise are around global threat defense, universal policies and unified reportingThese are foundational to having enterprise grade protection with the policy control and visibility needed for securing all users.
Now if we take a look at the need for a variable policy framework, we can look back at our user across the various locations.If we start with the security posture, the policy implementation should be consistent across all devices and locations. But when we look into Acceptable Use, what may be restricted content at corporate, based on ‘appropriate content’ to protect corporate reputation, is a different requirement when it comes to the users personal device, or perhaps personal time. As an example, viewing activist political content, or planned parenthood information may be prohibited by the company in the office to protect corporate reputation. However, the freedom to access this kind of content is expected by users on personal devices/time, and can be provided with a strong security posture still in place. One example may be access to Silk Roads anonymous marketplace for access certain types of drugs. (pick relevant examples and change the icon above as needed).If we look at another policy variable, we can take compliance as an example. Where in the office, many enterprises are required to log all information associated with a user, that policy may soften as the employee leaves the office or is using a personal device. The remote or mobile compliance policy may be reduced to logging only corporate data that is accessed.Another popular example of course of policy around recreational use – for productivity reasons. Many organisations may allow facebook but block games on corporate devices, however users expect to have recreational freedom on their own devices and on their own time. BYOD initiatives raise these issues as well as users consider these to be personal devices, while IT considers them corporate assets. Companies need a framework to allow for policies specific to devices and users that can follow the user to any location, and provide the access that makes sense, while providing a solid security posture everywhere, and still providing IT the control they need to protect the corporate network.
Reporting is essential to gaining insight into your organisations web and user activiity – and is often the starting point to determining where policy actions can add value. <CLICK>Strong reporting requires first and foremost actionable intelligence, compliance and customisation.Blue Coat Reporting products deliver detailed visibility that allow your organisation to drill down on specific areas to identify required closed loop policy actions. A simple example may be to look at web usage by category, which may reveal that video is in fact very low on the list. However, looking into bandwidth consumption may reveal video to be a top offender, and an opportunity for bandwidth savings. Following up with a look at video applications being used will reveal whether bandwidth is being consumed by YouTube or CEO podcasts, or online video tutorials etc. This insight creates actionable intelligence that allows your business to allow or prioritise CEO podcasts over YouTube and apply additional policies as needed, and then return to reporting to view the impact of these closed loop actions. In addition, reporting works hand in hand with WebPulse technologies in combatting malware. As WebPulse looks at outbound traffic, it blocks call home traffic from infected desktops attempting to call home to their malware hosts. Reporting then follows up in real time to isolate and identify the offending desktop, and allow your IT organisation to take action. <CLICK>Blue Coat’s reporting product does support role based access as well as auditing for administrators. We have also added the ability to generate reports that make user information and selected data anonymous. This is a requirement in many countries to maintain user confidentiality and rights. This new functionality now enables you to leverage the value of reporting and send reports to those that need the intelligence and insight, without compromising any user identities or other confidential information. This is also an important capability to help IT Directors sell the value of this solution internally to HR, or Finance or other management members. <CLICK>Tailoring reports on your users web activity to quickly give you the insight you need is another key requirement for strong reporting.Blue Coat reporting products offer simple and straightforward pre-defined reports as well as the ability to create custom reports.The reporting dashboards are very well organised and can be customised via point and click to create the view you need whether by application or by user etc….all designed to give you intelligence you can use to support efficient and timely decision making.
Video dominates recreational traffic but it’s also being used increasingly in the enterprise for training and communications. Let’s first take the example of a video hosted from YouTube. That video tends to go through the data center then over the private wide area network to be served at the branch office. And if this is something that somebody finds interesting that a second, third or fourth person will watch that video is served across the WAN multiple times and can have a huge impact on the network. <CLICK> So here we have new requirements for really handling this traffic. If it’s live video you need to do stream splitting to lessen the burden on the network of multiple streams. For video on demand, as in the YouTube example, you need caching. If you watch the royal wedding and walk down the hall to tell your girlfriend to do that pretty soon 2 or 3 or 5 people have watched that same YouTube clip. So caching that on-demand content can have an extraordinary impact on bandwidth. And you need to do this for not only things like HTTP but also for other specialized or proprietary protocols like Adobe Flash, Silverlight, Windows Media, RTMP. <CLICK>And so with Blue Coat, we actually provide all those capabilities and deliver a real value of 10, 100 or even 1000 times bandwidth multiplication for video. <CLICK>For external video, like YouTube, Blue Coat caches a copy of the video at the branch office. <CLICK>When a second, third, or fourth person goes to request the same video, it is delivered from the ProxySG in the branch office, not from the Internet. For live streaming video, we actually take a single stream from the Internet and split it at the branch offices to serve multiple employees watching the same feed, significantly reducing the bandwidth being consumed by the video. <CLICK>In the case of internal video, we serve that from the data center and can either cache it at the branch, as in the case with YouTube, or split a live stream as well. Additionally, you can pre-populate video content in the branch office after peak hours to better manage your bandwidth. For bandwidth-intensive training videos, for instance, you can send those to the branch office ProxySG for your employees to access the video the next day. Whether it’s being able to scale internal video for training or communications purposes or whether its reducing the burden of recreational viewing and protecting from that video flood, the technologies fundamentally work for each of those use cases . <CLICK>