It’s not about the network any more.
That infrastructure is built out and providing the basic connectivity every business needs.
Now it’s all about users and applications and the way they communicate with each other. In this new IT world, application performance must be optimised and individual users must be secured throughout the enterprise. Sounds simple enough, but consider these seven key issues, trends, and challenges that you must contend with along the way.

• Data centres, servers, and applications are becoming more consolidated for cost and compliance reasons. But users are becoming more distributed – more than 80% work outside headquarters offices. This creates more application traffic (and slower response time) over expensive, constrained WAN links.
• Centralised file services provide your remote users with access to centrally-hosted productivity applications and files. But these applications use chatty protocols, exacerbating a WAN latency problem that no amount of bandwidth can improve.
• Business applications hosted inside the data centre – as well as those hosted out on the Internet – are all becoming more Webified and are running over SSL. That creates more encrypted traffic that traditional network devices cannot “see” and therefore you cannot manage, control, or accelerate.
• Live and on-demand video are becoming important tools to train and educate distributed
employees. But streaming media requires a significant amount of bandwidth and can quickly
consume WAN resources needed to support other essential applications. Likewise, these
applications can be a victim of limited bandwidth and deliver a poor end user
experience.
• Virtually every user is now armed with a Web browser, which gives them access to a lot
more than just business applications. That means more security threats, lost productivity, and more non-essential traffic slowing performance of the applications that matter most.
• Many organisations still have a centralised Internet gateway for security reasons. But
that means all Web traffic is backhauled over costly WAN links to remote users. As the
amount of Web traffic – good and bad – continues to increase, organisations will want
to consider “direct to ‘Net” gateways (split VPN) in remote offices.
• Finally, IT organisations are increasingly being pressured to ensure that the use of
critical and costly IT resources is properly aligned with the processes and priorities of
the business. In an enterprise without any clear boundaries, this level of policybased
user-application control is elusive.

Although these issues impact WAN application performance, they are not network problems.
As noted above, today’s networks are generally reliable systems that provide high availability
and ubiquitous access. In other words, the network is just fine, thank you. So the issues here
cannot be resolved with a “more of the same” approach. What’s needed is a new, overlay
infrastructure, specifically focused on user-application communications across a highly
distributed enterprise. This new infrastructure is known as an Application Delivery
Infrastructure (ADI) and combines elements of WAN optimisation, application acceleration,
policy-based controls, and Web security. Blue Coat is focused on helping its customers create an ADI that addresses the issues outlined above.
Blue Coat provides customers with a family of intelligent appliances and software
technologies that are deployed at critical points throughout the distributed enterprise –
including data centres, Internet gateways, branch offices, and even individual client
endpoints. In other words, wherever users need to communicate securely with applications,
inside or outside the organisation. Blue Coat appliances are unique because they are able
to understand – and control – the way users and applications interact and behave on the
network. These appliances are powered by a purposebuilt operating system (SGOS) that provides policy-based control over a broad set of integrated Web security andapplication performance optimisation technologies. Even better, Blue Coat does not require its customers to make a tradeoff between performance and security. Typically, if an appliance delivers a broad range of security functions, one would likely expect a significant performance impact (or vice versa – performance-oriented devices might actually compromise security). With Blue Coat there is no compromise, thanks to its unique combination of patented secure proxy technology combined with MACH5 (Multiprotocol Accelerated Caching Hierarchy) technology.