The high-end models in its catalog of ProxySG appliances are most often used as platforms for employee content filtering applications, and Blue Coat already offers URL lists from the likes of ISS, Websense, Secure Computing and SurfControl.
A lot of organizations looking at virus-scanning web protocols at the gateway have found that some systems really do not cut it. Unlike store-and-forward email systems, the web is a real-time application, and filterware demands a high-performance unit. Blue Coat says its proxy cache appliances are good at speeding up content filtering by caching frequently accessed objects, and without interrupting legitimate web traffic. The vendor says its approach can provide a 10-fold performance kicker to URL filtering.
The company started life as CacheFlow but repackaged its web cache appliance as a security gateway in 2002 with plans to evolve it into a platform for more advanced security and filtering services at the enterprise edge, chiefly as a reaction to the commoditization of the cache market. That said, what the company provides is fundamentally a proxy cache.
