Japan’s ACE Insurance Makes Policy with Blue Coat
Japan’s ACE Insurance Makes Integrated Visibility, Application Performance and Web Security a Standard Policy with Blue Coat
ACE Insurance is the Japanese subsidiary of the ACE Group, a comprehensive casualty insurance group based in Zurich, Switzerland. The ACE Group has offices in 53 countries and employs 15,000 people globally. Through its acquired companies, ACE Insurance has 90 years of experience in the Japanese market. ACE Insurance has grown rapidly as it diversified its businesses, and it is one of the top global players in the casualty insurance industry.
Based on innovative thinking and ACE Group’s global network, ACE Insurance strives to be the insurer of choice and provides world-class products and services that focus on customer
needs and satisfaction. The company’s visionary activities—which include obtaining ISO9001 certification for its casualty insurance division in 2000, the first life or casualty insurance company to do so in Japan – have made it an industry leader.
ACE Insurance is known for its innovative use of information systems, and ensuring that its information systems support the company’s focus on customer service as a priority. The technology-forward company uses Blue Coat’s Visibility and Secure Web Gateway solutions to gain greater visibility and control over applications as well as to optimize application performance and security. After an extremely successful deployment in Japan, ACE Insurance rolled the Blue Coat solutions out as the standard for the company worldwide.
Improved Visibility and Application Control
ACE Insurance’s network in Japan connects three offices in Tokyo, including the head office, 13 branch offices and 11 service offices. As the insurance business expanded and application traffic over the WAN increased, communications between the data center and its offices were delayed during peak periods, particularly in the morning. The application performance slowdown interfered with core operations on a regular basis.
ACE Insurance needed to improve application performance and response time so workers could stay productive and continue serving customers’ needs. ACE Insurance deployed Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances between its head office and its data centers to gain greater visibility and control over the applications on its enterprise network as well as to increase WAN capacity with compression.
With PacketShaper appliances, ACE Insurance can discover and monitor the many applications on its enterprise network as well as gain visibility into millions of Web sites by content category. These capabilities give the company valuable insight into its employees’ applications’ and Internet usage.
PacketShaper appliances can guarantee bandwidth for latency-sensitive applications, assign priorities to applications and Web content categories, and manage the impact of lower-priority or undesirable traffic with policy-based controls. PacketShaper appliances allow ACE Insurance to centralize configuration management, monitoring, network forensics, and historical performance reports.
ACE Insurance has seen strong payback from the compression module on PacketShaper, which tripled the effective WAN capacity and improved application performance between the head office and its data centers. ACE Insurance can now process 300 Mbps of traffic over 100-Mbps network connection.
“Blue Coat PacketShaper enabled ACE Insurance to use applications such as VoIP since compression reduced the bandwidth for transmitting data,” Fumitake Kato, manager of the System Operations Department in the Information System Division of ACE Insurance.
“Network quality also became more stable due to bandwidth control. PacketShaper’s compression module provided substantial cost-benefit advantages compared to other solutions, such as bandwidth enhancement.
Real-Time Malware Protection
Like most businesses, ACE Insurance was under siege from Internet-based security threats. In fact, new malware attacked ACE Insurance almost daily. The company’s previous Internet gateway was reaching end-of-life and was not providing adequate protection against Web 2.0 threats. The size of the virus definition file had grown substantially because of the growth in Web traffic and malware, and performance was flagging.
ACE Insurance selected Blue Coat’s Secure Web Gateway solution with its layered, real- time defense architecture to stop malware. “Improving security without deterioration in performance is one of the major attractions of Blue Coat,” said Kato.
The Secure Web Gateway solution includes WebFilter with the WebPulse service, ProxySG and ProxyAV appliances, and Reporter. Blue Coat ProxySG appliances protect ACE employees in all offices from Web threats, phishing and other attacks. The ProxySG appliances also accelerate application performance for files, email, Web, SSL and rich media applications.
Blue Coat WebFilter blocks malware and filters content according to ACE Insurance’s Internet security policies. WebFilter provides a solid front-line defense against new and fast-spreading threats, as well as botnet and spyware phone-home protection. WebFilter has user ratings for tens of millions of websites, or billions of Web pages, covers more than 55 languages and organizes Web pages into 80 categories. With WebFilter, ACE Insurance has real-time Web protection and ratings from the WebPulse cloud defense in any location on any network.
Blue Coat WebFilter includes WebPulse service, a collaborative cloud-based defense to analyze and categorize unknown content and links. The WebPulse service sees more Web content than any single organization, as it collects real-time inputs of newly created Web content and sites from more than 75 million users. The WebPulse service relies on the new content to perform immediate analysis using over 300 Web rating libraries and real-time threat analysis. It also provides sandboxing, script analysis, call home detection and full link analysis in a mix of real-time threat analysis, background processes, proactive Web analysis, third-party feeds and human raters.
ACE Insurance also uses ProxyAV appliances for advanced malware detection at the Internet gateway between its Japan and overseas offices. ProxyAV appliances work in conjunction with ProxySG appliances to provide inline threat protection and malware scanning of all Web content at the gateway. ProxyAV appliances inspects files up to 2GB in size and can analyze up to 99 layers of compression in archives, plus detect masquerading files within archives.
Blue Coat ProxyAV appliances can be set to check on new engine or malware signature updates every five minutes and provides a choice of five leading AV engines. Workers are protected against viruses, Trojans, worms, malware and other malicious content – even if they are not running anti-virus software. Plus, ProxySG and ProxyAV appliances work together to keep long load Web objects, such as stock tickers and Web radio, out of threat analysis processes for optimal performance.
The company uses Blue Coat Reporter s to gain visibility into all Web-related user activity. With Reporter, ACE Insurance can identify external attacks that had previously gone unnoticed and identify trends in types of Websites employees accessed. This information helps shape the company’s Internet policy.
Reliable Application Performance for a Reliable Company
ACE Insurance considers itself to be a reliable insurance company for both agents and customers and with Blue Coat Visibility and Secure Web Gateway solutions, the Japanese insurer can enhance worker productivity and customer responsiveness by optimizing and securing the flow of information across its business.
