Cleaner, quieter, smoother and safer transportation: That’s the mission of Tenneco, a leading designer, manufacturer and distributor of emission control and ride control products. Tenneco’s customers are household names, including General Motors, Ford and Daimler, and its products are also sold through after-market retailers including NAPA and Pep Boys. The $5.9 billion company operates more than 80 manufacturing facilities on six continents and has 22,000 employees.

Tenneco needed a cost-efficient secure Web gateway solution. “We wanted to implement a user-friendly, uniform platform in our American and European data centers,” says Dirk De Craemere, technical security lead at Tenneco. “We needed a trustworthy application to control Internet access and use, with simple user authentication and single sign-on.”

Cushioned Against Internet Security Bumps

After a thorough evaluation, Tenneco selected Blue Coat’s Secure Web Gateway solution, which provides real-time protection against dynamic malware attacks. Tenneco deployed Blue Coat ProxySG appliances, WebFilter, ProxyClientTM, Reporter and ClientManager in its Brussels and Chicago data centers. The ProxySG appliances in Tenneco’s Chicago and Brussels data centers operate in high availability mode.

“We were very impressed with Blue Coat,” says De Craemere. Tenneco moved the first users to Blue Coat within two months of purchasing the solution. “This was realized in an incredibly short period of time,” says De Craemere.

With Blue Coat’s Secure Web Gateway solution, Tenneco gained real-time protection against dynamic malware attacks and flexible control and enforcement of its corporate Internet policies for Web content, users and applications. Integration between the ProxySG appliance and Active Directory makes it simple for IT to assign users to a specific group, and then give access rights to those different groups. “With more than 80 categories in WebFilter, we could deploy a consistent Web access policy for our global operations,” says De Craemere.

The benefits were immediate to users and IT alike. “All of our employees throughout the world use these systems, whether they are in Asia, South Africa, Europe, or North America,” says De Craemere. “The solution is elegant, truly user friendly and global. Employees travelling from Europe to the U.S. do not have to make any changes.” Proxy settings are forwarded transparently from one continent to the other, which creates a better user experience and reduces maintenance for the IT staff.

Blue Coat WebFilter includes the WebPulseTM cloud ecosystem for a front-line defense against new and fast-spreading threats, as well as botnet and spyware protection. WebPulse sees more Web content than any single organization, and provides sandboxing, script analysis, call-home detection and full link analysis.

Workers Safe and Productive on the Road

Tenneco also uses ProxyClient to optimize application performance and security for remote and mobile users. “Blue Coat not only improves the speed of applications and increases efficient use of bandwidth, but also it implements this change in architecture effortlessly and is close to perfection,” says De Craemere.

Tenneco also uses Blue Coat ClientManager to set custom filtering policies for ProxyClient. “We can choose what URLs and categories to deny or allow. That is a powerful feature. For example, we have created a special policy that disallows any Internet traffic that is not business-critical during our quarterly internal Webcasts. We can do the same for important Web meetings with clients. This means we can improve the quality of interaction without requiring physical meetings. For a global organization such as Tenneco, this realizes vast cost savings in travel expenses.”

ROI Gains Traction

De Craemere is very positive about the return on investment (ROI) with Blue Coat, and estimates an 80 percent cost savings compared to previous solutions.

With the combination of ProxySG appliances and Reporter, Tenneco can manage the cost of WAN use in real time. “If we limit certain categories to power users, we can immediately show the cost savings. This has already provided the basis for policies limiting the use of streaming media, social networking, and recreational traffic,” says De Craemere. “It also allows us to create various block screens to explain the applicable policies. This is easily done and very user friendly. We can give a clear and understandable explanation of why user activity is blocked.”

Blue Coat Reporter gives Tenneco insight into all Web-related user activity. “Reporter provides us with customizable, at-a-glance dashboards and reports,” says De Craemere. “This generates immediate and valuable intelligence. Reporter allows us to measure and maintain the effects of our security strategy, compliance and bandwidth management. It also supports making better business-critical management decisions.”

“We considered Blue Coat because of its market leadership,” says De Craemere. “Although a leading market position in itself is not a decisive factor to us, Blue Coat knows leadership comes with great responsibility. This is an advantage to us because we can rely on the company putting all efforts in maintaining the highest quality of its solutions and support. In the end, the decision for Blue Coat was based on the fact that they simply offer the best solution in every respect, from both a technological and a financial viewpoint.”