WAN OPTIMISATION
TONY WALTHAM
An IDC survey released last week shows that branch offices in more than 40 percent of Asia Pacific companies that were surveyed access the Internet directly rather than backhauling Internet traffic over their corporate WAN through centralised gateway at a headquarters office or regional data centre.
The advantages of "direct to the net" online access for branch offices were many, according to Blue Coat's senior director of product marketing Mark Urban, especially given the high costs of corporate leased lines.
And he noted that this was particularly the case here in Thailand where a 1Mbps leased line can cost 35,000 baht compared with direct access broadband costs of around 1,000 baht.
Urban noted that when companies backhauled all traffic from branch offices through a centralised gateway, they found that up to between 40 and 60 percent of bandwidth was consumed by recreational traffic. This presented recurring performance issues for business applications, he added
Very often the solution was to add more expensive bandwidth for the backhaul, but the better response times gained tended not to be for long, and led to heavier recreational use by employees, he said.
Blue Coat's solution is to provide branch offices with its ProxySG appliances that combine security with optimisation and which can establish points of control that accellerate and secure business applications for users across a distributed organisation.
"We see a significant number of companies that either have branch offices with direct Internet access or who are in the process of migrating to such access, rather than relying on backhauling that traffic to a centralised access point across teh WAN," said Blue Coat Systems Thailand country manager William Tan.
Companies are rejecting the high cost and inefficiencies of backhauling Internet traffic. With Blue Coat appliances, companies could gain 'direct to the net' branch office access while maintaining consistent, centrally-managed security and control by using the same appliance that provided WAN optimisation, he added.
"We enable companies to migrate from backhauling to direct Internet connections in the branch," he said.
Blue Coat's ProxySG appliances can also enforce company policy at the branch level and can be set to block certain sites or data types that are not desired, in addition to blocking malware and spyware.
This is done by a service called WebPulse, and last month the service reached a milestone by analysing more than 150 million web requests per day, a 50 percent increase in less than six months.
WebPluse ensures that its ProxySG clients recognise the most relevant URLs to help protect customers from new sources of malicious threats. The WebPulse protection also protects families who sign up for the free K9 web filter that helps protect children's Internet access, and which can be fine tuned in terms of web sites that may be accessed by parents.
Blue Coat is a leader in application delivery networking at a time when companies are consolidating servers in regional or global data centres while at the same time Internet traffic, driven by video, voice over IP and software as a service is exploding while workforces are becoming more distributed, according to IDC.
Blue Coat also recently introduced a free ProxySG software client for laptops and PCs that extends protection to mobile users.
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