Blue Coat accelerates application delivery across the enterprise Wide Area Network

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.

'As enterprises in the Middle East become more mobile and remote access to corporate networks more prevalent, delivering accelerated, secure traffic becomes of paramount importance,' said Ray Kafity, Blue Coat Middle East general manager.

'Blue Coat accelerates the full range of key business applications, including those encrypted by SSL. 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.'

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.

'By 2009 we predict that half of all branch offices will have direct Internet connections,' continued Kafity. 'As branch offices become directly connected to the Internet, they need the same levels of Web security as headquarters.'

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.'

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.

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.

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.