Blue Coat Systems Security Gateway appliances are made for organizations to accelerate the content coming from and going to the Internet and to make the Internet access as secure as possible. As the company doesn't develop anti virus solutions, strategic alliances with Symantec and Trend Micro were made in order to strenghten the security process by virus scanning the content. Virus scanning on a cache basis comes quite handy, because there is every growing list of malware propagating via Internet by embedding itself into e-mails, streaming and web pages.

Security Gateway 800	Security Gateway 6000

These appliances are based on a custom operating environment, SGOS, that incorporates Blue Coat's Policy Processing Engine - a patent-pending framework for applying security, access, filtering and performance policies for any Web transaction.

"Content filtering is done with our scripting language, Content Policy Language (CPL), or with Visual Policy Manager, which is the graphical interface of the language. Security rules created with this tool are based only on content as the product is an application firewall, not the regular firewall. CPL can be used for creating rules depending on protocols and even methods, for example filtering the HTTP post or FTP put". - Mr. Duflos said and added "I think firewalls are doing a great job securing the networks, but they are not doing a great job to secure the applications".




Screenshot of Visual Policy Manager interface

While talking about port 80 security, Mr. Duflos said: "The time of the network based attacks passed us, because the firewalls are doing a great job. Majority of new security risks are on an application level. Our products take the very open port 80, close it a bit and actively scan it."

In October the SG800 Web Security Appliance, has topped Tolly Group (independent testing and strategic consulting organization) feature comparison among products from Cisco, Inktomi, Microsoft, Network Appliance and Sun. The appliance also received the highest marks in a more in-depth head to head Web performance evaluation that included products from Cisco, Network Appliance and Inktomi. One month earlier, in mid September, the same appliance has received the World-Class Award from Network World magazine, where it has been recognized for its ability to rapidly and intelligently inspect Web-based traffic that is usually passed through firewalls undetected.