The ProxyAV line of appliances, to be announced today, can scan web content for viruses while, at the high end, adding only an average of 4 milliseconds of latency, according to Blue Coat director of corporate marketing Frank Cabri.
A lot of companies looking at deeply virus-scanning web protocols at the gateway have found that they didn’t perform, Cabri said. Unlike store-and-forward email systems, the web is a real-time application, he said.
Buyers need to already have a ProxySG, Blue Coat’s proxy cache appliance, on their networks. The ProxySG sends the ProxyAV only those web objects, such as executables, that can be used to deliver viruses and worms. Clean objects are cached on the SG.
Buyers also need to buy antivirus software to run on the ProxyAV, either from McAfee, Panda, Sophos and Trend Micro, or from Blue Coat, which supports and resells those four vendors. Symantec support may come in future.
Blue Coat also supports those vendors’ products, along with Symantec’s anti-virus software, when they are deployed on separate servers and tied into the ProxySG via the Internet Content Adaptation Protocol (iCAP).
The ProxyAV 400 and 2000 Series come in six models and are priced between $4,495 and $20,995. The devices will compete against appliances and software from the likes of Trend, McAfee and Symantec.
