WAN Optimization, Network Control & Application Performance White Papers

Click on the links below to download Blue Coat's latest whitepapers.

Osterman Research - Critical Need to Secure The Web in Your Company
Web exploits are a serious issue for any organization and they are getting worse. Growing use of the Web and Web 2.0 applications, coupled with increasing corporate reliance on cloud-based systems that employees access via Web browsers are making organizations more vulnerable to a variety of Web-focused exploits and attacks. The cost of doing nothing to address the issue is enormous. As a result, organizations of all sizes should deploy a secure Web gateway that will protect against Web exploits in real time, will use both cloud-based and local content analysis techniques, provide granular policy management and application controls, integrate with messaging security capabilities, and provide support to users who access the Web and Web-based applications on mobile devices.

A Guide for Understanding Cloud Computing
In spite of the confusion around the exact definition of cloud computing, the primary goal of cloud computing is remarkably clear. That goal is to make a dramatic improvement in the cost effective, elastic provisioning of IT services. Read this guide for information on characteristics and concepts around cloud computing.

Cloud Computing: A Reality Check & Guide to Risk Mitigation
Read this report for a reality check on cloud computing from the perspective of an IT organization. Learn to identify the risks to consider before making either an initial or additional use of public or private cloud computing solutions.

Nemertes Research White Paper: Application Awareness for Service Providers
New applications and an evolving organizational environment drive enterprise bandwidth growth and a need for predictable, stable, real-time performance. A new generation of enterprise application Web front-ends and Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings, plus the move to direct-to-Internet branch connections are shifting where optimization and security services must be delivered. Faced with budget and staffing issues, enterprise interest in managed optimization for WAN and Internet traffic is growing, and among managed service providers, carriers are well positioned to offer such services. Learn how Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can inject application awareness into their services as their next value-add and as a critical differentiator.

Application Delivery Networks for Federal Agencies
WAN Challenges in the 21st Century: Blue Coat creates a new level of control in the network stack – a new Application Delivery Network above the connectivity level to address the security and application acceleration challenges of federal agencies. The Blue Coat ADN is a powerful, scalable solution that enables federal agencies to see, secure, accelerate, and control their applications and better meet their IT and operational goals.

Protecting Against The Wave of Web Threats
Web-based threats are increasing in number and severity. The consequences of becoming infected can be extensive and cause significant damage to an organization’s revenue, employee productivity, reputation and long-term survival. Organizations should adopt a multi-layered Web defense strategy that can protect their users and networks from increasingly sophisticated threats. Key elements of this strategy include community-watch monitoring of Web traffic using a cloud-based service, protection of remote clients, and real-time inputs from Web gateways and clients for background analysis to detect malware, rate reputations and analyze Web content.

Using SLAs to Gain a Competitive Advantage
Service providers are facing unprecedented competitive challenges due to the rising commodization of their traditional transport services and the growing uncertainty surrounding today's turbulent financial markets. In order to satisfy customers' escalating needs and expectations, service providers must implement new technologies to address their application and security management requirements. They must also provide service level agreements (SLAs) which clearly demonstrate their application-level performance.

Intelligent Control with an Application Delivery Network - A Technical Summary
Blue Coat offers ProxySG and PacketShaper together as an immediate solution to implement an Application Delivery Network, and meet the growing challenges for delivering applications faster and more securely across the distributed enterprise.

Application Acceleration for Satellite-Based Enterprise Services
Northern Sky Research has prepared this in-depth look at today's satellite communications, the demands placed on terminal links used in enterprise WANs, and the steps necessary to ensure business critical applications are delivered with the performance expected by subscribers.

Voice, Video and Data Convergence: a Best Practice Approach for Transitioning Your Network Infrastructure
In a converged network, VoIP, business and recreational traffic are often competing for limited bandwidth and creating performance problems for users across your enterprise. Yet, the business benefits of network convergence are unmistakable. Now is the time to prepare your IT infrastructure to take full advantage of convergence. This white paper identifies how to take control of your bandwidth for a successful IP telephony implementation.

Is Your Network Ready for VoIP?
Get real answers to your tough questions about implementing an IP telephony solution for your enterprise. This quick read white paper presents the key issues facing a VoIP deployment in question and answer format to supplement the strategic ideas you have learned in Blue Coat's "Voice, Video and Data Convergence: a Best Practice Approach" white paper.

Application Delivery Networks: The New Imperative for IT Visibility, Acceleration and Security
Your business depends on getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Doing so requires the ability to intelligently control the delivery of applications wherever users are located. In this white paper, you will learn why a comprehensive approach to seeing, accelerating, and securing your network traffic is essential to meeting the global challenges resulting from the need to consolidate resources while supporting an increasingly mobile work force.

ProxyClient Extends Application Delivery to End Points
With the ability to accelerate and secure user-to-application interaction, ProxyClient - which incorporates both application security and acceleration - restores IT control of users and applications communicating beyond the traditional physical boundaries of the enterprise.

Monitor and Control Recreational Traffic
The explosive use of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, personal networking sites like MySpace, and video-sharing sites like YouTube are all examples of the dramatic changes in how we communicate socially, particularly among younger populations. The underlying problem is how drastically these recreational applications can drag down your network performance.

Optimizing Managed Service Delivery with Secure Application Acceleration
This THINKstrategies analyst whitepaper examines service provider trends and challenges related to evolving service offerings and delivering differentiated, high-revenue managed secure acceleration services to business customers.

Enterprise IPTV and Video Streaming with the Blue Coat ProxySG
In this document we first provide an overview of the Blue Coat ProxySG and its MACH5 technology for Enterprise Content Delivery. We then provide an overview of the Jubilant ERM2 Platform for IPTV Management, and discuss how ERM2 integrates with the Blue Coat MACH5 technology suite to enable a seamless end-to-end solution for an enterprise.

Hidden Dangers in the Mobile Worker Jungle
From mobile workers' perspectives, up-to-the-minute information is the life blood of their jobs. Regardless of whether they are in a home office or on the other side of the globe, speed and dependability are the keys to successfully doing their jobs. From an IT department's perspective, they must support the needs of all employees, while diligently maintaining security policies, which is becoming increasingly challenging now that the majority of the workforce has stepped beyond the corporate walls. Can these two opposing forces be reconciled? Can remote access be both fast and secure from any location?

The Alarming Shift in Cybercrime
It’s now a popular marketing tactic to claim that “brand name” websites with well-known reputations are completely safe. However, it is exactly because of this perception that these sites are being targeted to become the unwitting hosts for invisible malware that can infect a computer just by the user checking the latest news or sports scores. This paper will examine the shift in the nature of cybercrimes, how the thieves target their victims, and what can be done to prevent them.

Blue Coat and SAP: Network Infrastructure Enhancements for Successful Enterprise SOA Deployments
A number of important business trends affect the way today's enterprises use and deploy SAP business applications. This natural evolution results in enterprise SOA application software components and end users spread worldwide, connected via a wide-area network (WAN) infrastructure. Learn how a feature rich, secure application delivery solution from Blue Coat Systems can protect your enterprise SOA investment by improving performance, reducing server CPU utilization, and guaranteeing reliable access to applications by securing and controlling your WAN infrastructure.

How to Secure and Accelerate Your Oracle Applications
This whitepaper will examine the escalating application performance and security challenges facing corporations, and show how companies are securing and optimizing the performance of their enterprise applications, such as those from Oracle, with WAN application delivery solutions, such as those from Blue Coat.

Application Layer vs. TCP Layer WAN Optimization
When planning the capacity of a WAN optimization solution, it's best to base calculations on a WAN optimization appliance's ability to perform application-layer functions, such as managing user counts and protocol optimization throughput, rather than on low-level metrics such as TCP counts.

A Technical Review of Caching Technologies
This document explains current caching technologies and how they function to improve application acceleration and minimize bandwidth utilization.

Taking Control of Secure Application Delivery
Industry thought leader, Jim Metzler, examines architectural models and requirements to ensure secure, accelerated delivery of applications to all remote users

Accelerate SSL Encrypted Applications
The amount of SSL traffic is growing in the enterprise. Because it is encrypted, it cannot be properly controlled and accelerated. Blue Coat SG appliances with MACH5 technology provides complete visibility into SSL application sessions, making it easy to apply appropriate acceleration and security controls to all SSL traffic.

Blue Coat WebFilter Technology
This document examines the requirements for dynamic content filtering solution to perform an effective policy enforcement and gateway security role, and details Blue Coat WebFilter’s approach.

A Security and Acceleration Solution for K-12 Networks
The rapid adoption of eLearning applications has introduced a broad set of challenges for K-12 school districts, including web filtering, web security, and network performance. Blue Coat provides abundant policy controls wrapped in optimized hardware and a custom operating system to give K-12 school districts a proven high-performance option for gaining visibility, control, and acceleration of their web and key eLearning applications.

How to Gain Visibility and Control of Encrypted SSL Web Sessions
There is an increasing need for enterprise users to access business applications and sensitive information hosted outside the corporate network. In those situations, SSL provides users with the secure connection they need to maintain privacy over the Internet. However, hackers are discovering ways to penetrate encrypted SSL sessions and cause damage to internal corporate resources. Blue Coat’s "Inside Out" SSL Proxy solution provides the visibility and control IT organizations need to stop these threats and ensure session privacy.

Secure and Accelerate Web Applications and Public Websites
This white paper overviews the performance and security values provided by Blue Coat SG appliances for reverse proxy deployments. Accelerate web content delivery with integrated caching, isolate web servers from direct Internet access, and secure communications with optional SSL services.