Blue Coat Middle East, the proxy appliance vendor has launched its ProxyAV, a high-performance web anti-virus appliance. The Dubai Internet City based company also announced that its first half revenues for 2004 have grown 25% over the same period last year.
“We have put together a strategic plan to double our market share by the end of 2004 by investing heavily in our Middle East operations and channel, and focusing on high growth economic sectors such as the financial sector and oil and gas,” says Ray Kafity, general manager, Blue Coat Middle East. The security vendor also plans to kick off a region-wide road show in the third quarter of this year to increase market uptake.
Blue coat claims its proxy appliances enable organisations to keep ‘good’ employees from doing ‘bad’ things on the internet by filtering inappropriate web surfing, viruses brought in via back door channels such as instant messaging and web-based email, and network resource abuse due to peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and video streaming.
According to the vendor, gateway web anti-virus is not widely deployed in organisations today due to inadequate throughput and latency experienced with existing products. When a web anti-virus solution is installed that slows down response times for browser-based traffic, IT staff are faced with the challenge of compromising between the performance users demand, and the security required by the business.
This has been the situation with web anti-virus, which unfortunately has created open back doors in the security infrastructure that have allowed web-based viruses to infect enterprise systems. These open back doors include employee use of Web-based personal email and Internet file downloads.
The ProxyAV works in concert with Blue Coat’s ProxySG platform, which scans web traffic up to 249 Mbits/s in four milliseconds to determine which objects should be scanned for viruses. The internet content is then sent to the ProxyAV appliance where they are scanned for viruses using any enterprise level software such McAfee, Panda, Sophos, Trend Micro or Norton and sent back to the Proxy SG where they can be cached.
ProxyAV allows customers to implement a layered anti-virus defense across the distributed enterprise, where a different anti-virus engine can be deployed at the internet gateway to complement email servers and desktops.
