Blue Coat rolls out new cloud connectivity option

Blue Coat rolls out new cloud connectivity option

By Joan Engebretson

Cloud-Connector aims to minimize traffic between branch offices and corporate data centers for a performance boost

Blue Coat Systems today announced Cloud-Connector, a new cloud connectivity option for enterprises with branch locations. The offering, which is implemented on the same platform that supports Blue Coat's WAN optimization service, aims to minimize the amount of Internet-destined traffic from branch offices that first flows through the corporate data center, thereby enhancing performance and potentially reducing costs.

As Blue Coat Senior Director of Product Marketing Mark Urban explained in an interview, many corporations have a "fear of opening the branch office to the great unwashed Internet." Accordingly, they set up their networks so that Internet traffic to and from branch offices flows through a central corporate data center.

"In April we rolled out security as a service," explained Urban. "With Cloud-Connector, you can use the same box [that supports the security service] to forward Internet traffic to a web security cloud and remove security concerns using our cloud service." Also supporting the offering is an additional box at Blue Coat's data center.

Urban sees demand for this type of application growing as cloud services become increasingly popular. The Cloud-Connector offering removes cloud access traffic, as well as recreational traffic such as You Tube from the corporate data center.

Some customers have already used the service
Instead of the single wide area network connection that each branch location typically would have had previously, each branch now will require two connections to support Cloud-Connector—one to the Internet via Blue Coat's data center, and one to the corporate data center. To implement the dual connections, corporations can order an additional virtual circuit or configure a split tunnel on their MPLS service, Urban said.

Blue Coat rolled out Cloud-Connector to several customers several months ago. "We wanted to get it in environments working with the cloud before we started to talk about it," said Urban. The company now plans to market the service "more actively" on November 22, he said.

Cloud-Connector joins Blue Coat's suite of cloud services, which also include caching (CP: As mobile data booms, Blue Coat triples cache performance), security and WAN optimization, which is designed to enhance the performance of a company's internal applications.