Blue Coat Appliance Protects Against Web Threats

SAN FRANCISCO—Blue Coat Systems Inc. on Monday expanded its lineup of security appliances with the introduction of the high-end ProxySG 8000.

The new box runs on dual 3.2GHz Xeon processors and is designed mainly for installation in large central offices. The 8000 also includes a variety of storage options, up to 584GB on the box itself, which also has the ability to offload data to network storage.

Blue Coat, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., will be showing off the new appliance at the RSA Conference, which begins here Tuesday.

Like Blue Coats other appliances, the 8000 is purpose-built to protect enterprises against threats coming in via the Web. The system includes a range of protection technologies, such as content filtering, anti-virus, content security and instant messaging control.

When first installed, the 8000 begins logging all of the networks traffic on port 80. It then produces a report on the traffic patterns and a list of recommendations about which protection technologies to turn on. For enterprises that never had any real idea of what kind of traffic is going across the networks, the results can be disconcerting.

“We saw a lot of hits on Gator.com when we turned it on, so we were trying to figure out whats going on,” said Chuck Walker, senior network administrator at Tennis Corporation of America, in Chicago, which has been using the ProxySG 8000 since November. “It turns out our machines were completely riddled with spyware. Without going and inspecting every machine, we wouldnt have known that. The other beauty of it is, it integrates with Active Directory so we dont have to manage two sets of users.”

The ProxySG 8000 will be available in March, and pricing will start at about $40,000 and range upward, depending on the amount of memory and storage.