Blue Coat : Optimise traffic and save money

WAN OPTIMISATION / 'ACCELERATE THE GOOD, STOP THE BAD'

Blue Coat : Optimise traffic and save money

TONY WALTHAM

With Internet leased lines here being the most expensive in the Asean region, Blue Coat Systems' policy-based approach to WAN optimisation that accellerates the good traffic and stops or limits the bad or unwanted Internet traffic can pay for itself in a year or so.

So says Blue Coat's Thailand country manager William Tan who explained that the company combined accelleration with security - and he used the metaphor of shampoos that both washed and conditioned one's hair. Why buy two different hair care products, he asked?

The company sees opportunities here to deploy its WAN optimisation and accelleration appliances in combination with its Secure Gateway (ProxySG) solutions, while the requirements in the recently-enacted Cyber Security Law that mandate that companies maintain logs of Internet access are expected to drive sales of its gateway solutions.

Tan explained that merely accellerating traffic was not enough, just as investing in more bandwidth was no solution to traffic congestion over the Internet which, if not controlled or filtered, would be "gobbled up" through inappropriate use by end-users.

Noting that in Thailand there was heavy use of MSN inside corporations, he said customers should see the results for themselves since an investment in a Blue Coat solution would pay for itself in bandwidth costs in 12- to 16-months.

Blue Coat could also help organisations such as universities here control usage by students and limit the bandwidth used, according to policies that could be defined, based on the nature of the traffic, by the sites being visited and according to the time of day, he said.

Many companies were being established in Thailand as a springboard for Indochina, while trading partnerships between Thailand and Vietnam, which was five to seven years behind Thailand, were getting stronger, he said.

Blue Coat sees potential here in the WAN optimisation market in manufacturing, financial and banking, retail and commerce, logistics and shipping sectors as well as in local and state universities.

This year, Gartner positioned Blue Coat in the leadership quadrant for WAN optimisation controllers while the analyst firm also cited the company as the leader in the proxy gateway category, Tan said.

Blue Coat has also expanded its capabilities in web filtering, drawing on a comprehensive database that engages resources of nine partners to categorise web sites, according to Blue Coat (Thailand) systems engineer Piya Paitoonrajitpipit.

Anti-phishing capabilites were recently added to its web-filtering capabilities and Piya said that this could protect employees by blocking access to phishing web sites or by warning users that they are attempting to open a phishing web page that could expose them to potential fraud or theft.

Blue Coat's WebFilter runs on its ProxySG appliances and the on-proxy database has over 15 million website ratings representing billions of web pages of real Internet usage.

The Cyber Security law, passed here in August, mandates that companies that provide Internet access to their customer need to maintain logs of Internet access by all their employees and becomes effective six months after the enactment of the law.

This means that by February all companies here have these logs available on demand to police, while Blue Coat's reporting capabilites in its ProxySG appliances were able to perform monitoring and logging at the user level, Piya said.