SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 18, 2015) - On the heels of Blue Coat's significant acquisition of cloud innovator Elastica,Inc.  last week, Blue Coat Systems, Inc. today introduced a new set of cloud generation products and features to its market-leading Blue Coat Security Platform, integrating essential components required for protecting enterprises in today's rapidly changing IT environment.

These "Cloud Generation" capabilities represent a major evolution of the Secure Web Gateway, combining Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), integrated Web Application Firewall (WAF), and encrypted traffic management (SSL), significantly advancing Blue Coat's industry-leading web and cloud security solution. Together with the CloudSOC™ capabilities from Elastica and the encryption and tokenization technology from the Perspecsys acquisition, Blue Coat's Cloud Generation Gateway™ forms a foundation of the Blue Coat Security Platform, leveraging Blue Coat's expertise in network, security and cloud to ensure protection of both existing and future computing environments.

Blue Coat announced five new product offerings to address these challenges:

  • CASB Visibility and Access Security extend Blue Coat's market-leading Secure Web Gateway to deliver comprehensive cloud application risk management capabilities. This allows organizations to safely control sanctioned cloud operations, and manage shadow IT usage.
  • Cloud Data Protection organizations traditionally lose control of their data when it is placed inside of cloud applications. Blue Coat's Cloud Data Protection delivers market-leading tokenization and encryption to ensure data residency compliance and security, and allows customers to maintain complete control of their data as they use cloud applications.
  • Advanced Secure Gateway, a new model in Blue Coat's line of secure web gateways, delivers consolidated content analysis for ATP, which combines anti-virus scanning, whitelisting, static code analysis and orchestration for sandbox analysis.
  • Cloud Generation Intelligence Services provides risk intelligence for web, cloud applications, files, and advanced threats to deliver up-to-the-moment threat data from Blue Coat's Global Intelligence Network.
  • Integrated WAF delivers third generation capabilities for protecting inbound application services for organizationally owned data center and cloud applications.

Capabilities from Elastica's CloudSOC, such as full cloud application DLP and cloud breach detection, auditing and forensics, will be quickly integrated into the Blue Coat Security Platform and the Cloud Generation Gateway feature set.

"Massive shifts in usage of cloud applications and services are driving dramatic new requirements that are begging for a new approach to security," said Michael Fey, Blue Coat president and COO. "As organizations rethink how they secure in the cloud age, it is important that they not only protect and control interactions with cloud applications, but have an easily extensible and elastic solution. The current trend offered by niche vendors forces customers into a situation where they have spread a single cloud interaction by a user across multiple solutions and multiple clouds. Doing so injects complexity, delay and ambiguity into their defensive posture, which is not a viable option. The Blue Coat Security Platform and our Cloud Generation capabilities deliver customers a new and unprecedented level of security and integration in this cloud age."

A New Security Solution for Today's IT Environment

Maintaining Control Over The Evolving Network
 Seismic shifts in the enterprise IT environment are driving a requirement to rethink security. New connectivity options have emerged, and encrypted traffic is on the rise, creating blind spots for security controls. Wi-Fi and 4G/5G have become the standard connectivity norm even in the office, causing the traditional network perimeter to essentially dissolve, and cloud services like salesforce.com and Box to foster new work patterns. In this changing environment, the Blue Coat Cloud Generation Gateway delivers absolute security by providing full visibility and control for web and cloud access, regardless of location, from any device, even if the traffic is encrypted.

Facilitating Migration to Cloud
 Sanctioned cloud adoption and shadow IT spawned by the easy availability of click-to-compute cloud applications and services like Box or AWS are creating concerns around cloud data security, data residency and compliance. Further, these shifts mean that organizations will require new virtual form factors and agile capabilities to dynamically adapt within an elastic public and private cloud world. The Cloud Generation Gateway focuses on these industry shifts, allowing customers to assess and control the risk of unsanctioned cloud usage, while adding critical security controls to eliminate data leakage, retain data residency through tokenization, maintain compliance for sanctioned cloud applications, and protect corporate data center and cloud applications.

Securing the Endpoint and Connected Device Revolution
 Endpoints have evolved beyond the traditional computing platforms of servers and desktops, yet the security controls for the next generation endpoint have not evolved with them. Connected computing environments like mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) introduce new attack surfaces that must be protected, yet unfortunately endpoint security controls are not the answer. Organizations leveraging these new devices are simply unable to deploy endpoint security controls because these devices lack the interfaces to do so. The best way to effectively protect these devices is via Cloud Generation Gateways, which can broker the interactions these devices have with the world around them. Doing so allows organizations to perform in-depth inspection and gain complete visibility, even when endpoint security cannot be used.

The Cloud Generation Gateway is an essential component of The Blue Coat Security Platform which addresses evolving network, security and cloud requirements with five advanced solutions that work equally well across on-premise and cloud-managed environments:

  • Advanced web and cloud security
  • Encrypted traffic management
  • Advanced threat protection
  • Incident response and network forensics
  • Network performance and optimization

About Blue Coat Systems
 Blue Coat is a leader in advanced enterprise security, protecting 15,000 organizations every day, including 88 of the 100 largest global companies. Through the Blue Coat Security Platform, Blue Coat unites network, security and cloud, providing customers with maximum protection against advanced threats, while minimizing impact on network performance and enabling cloud applications and services. Blue Coat was acquired by Bain Capital in March 2015. For additional information, please visit www.bluecoat.com.

Blue Coat and the Blue Coat logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Blue Coat Systems, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and certain other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.