Blue Coat delivers bandwidth savings, increased efficiencies

Gordon Peters
Wednesday, 14 April 2010 00:12

IT Industry - Deals

Australian non-alcoholic and non-dairy beverages company, P&N Beverages has contracted application delivery networking vendor, Blue Coat Systems, to deploy its application delivery network infrastructure across its operation, with expected savings of $100,000 a year in bandwidth costs and a significant reduction in remote access times to large Microsoft Office files.

Joe Esposito, national IT manager for P&N Beverages, said today, the company expected to reduce remote access times to large Microsoft Office files from as much as 20 minutes to under 60 seconds, and that by optimising and securing the delivery of business applications to more than 700 employees distributed across 10 locations, Blue Coat Proxy appliances are expected to save the company $100,000 a year in bandwidth costs.

"By dramatically reducing access times, the Blue Coat application delivery network solution became indispensable to our branch offices users. At the same time, ProxySG appliances provide our users with continuous protection from unrated websites and even from good websites compromised by malware."

According to Esposito, after P&N Beverages consolidated its information and applications from numerous locations into a centralised data centre, it took Excel and PowerPoint users in its branch offices as much as 15-20 minutes to open large files traversing the WAN.  'With the use of ProxySG appliances, access times decreased to under 60 seconds. Blue Coat ProxySG appliances have also significantly improved the performance of the company's Microsoft Exchange Server, Internet access and network printing services.  In addition, the same appliances provide a strong first line of defence against Web-based threats.'

Mikhael Haidar, CEO for Networx Australia, which provides fully managed secure Internet services to P&N Beverages and maintains its network, said that to protect against Web-based threats and other dangerous content, including inappropriate websites and downloads, P&N Beverages deployed Blue Coat WebFilter in conjunction with ProxySG appliances. 'WebFilter works in tandem with the Blue Coat WebPulse service, a collaborative cloud-based defence, that analyses and categories unknown content and links.  The discovery of malware by one of more than 62 million users immediately protects all users, providing protection against emerging threats.'

According to Haidar, in a competitive evaluation conducted by P&N Beverages, Blue Coat WebFilter delivered 'more effective protection against new and emerging threats and more accurately categorised and rated unknown Web content and links.  By accurately categorising new content, the Blue Coat solution enables P&N Beverages to consistently enforce and measure compliance to its corporate IT policies to content being accessed by its employees.  The ProxySG appliances enable network administrators to apply policies on a granular basis, including by user, content, time of day, group or any other combination of more than 100 categories.

"With Blue Coat's combination of Web security and WAN optimisation, you have a single vendor integrated approach which simplifies things for the customer and reseller. Blue Coat appliances simultaneously resolve application latency issues, reduce bandwidth consumption and deliver security and control, enabling P&N to improve the continuity of its business operations."

Wayne Neich, country manager, Australia and New Zealand for Blue Coat Systems, said that "as a fast-growing Australian manufacturer, P&N Beverages is driving innovation and value in the beverage market.  The Blue Coat solution allows P&N to achieve greater levels of efficiency within its IT operations by speeding up business-critical applications and protecting its infrastructure from security threats that would otherwise reduce performance and reliability."