***The following story is from an eBook sponsored by Blue Coat Systems and xchange magazine. Download the eBook “Driving Revenue and Increasing Value with Application Performance Management” today at www.xchangemag.com/bluecoat.***
No one would argue that network security isn’t the No. 1 priority for corporate CIOs. A 2007 IDC survey of WAN managers is just one testament to the fact. Eighty percent of CIOs rated it their top concern. Clearly, it’s not an optional feature of the corporate WAN, so the question is how does it impact the application acceleration goal — CIOs’ No. 2 priority in the IDC survey.
“Most people out there that work in an IT environment automatically think that if I make something more secure, the net effect is that it gets slower,” said Craig Hick-Frazer, vice president – service provider, for Blue Coat Systems Inc., a provider of WAN optimization, acceleration and security solutions for enterprises and service providers. “The second you start inspecting, checking traffic as it comes past on the fly, you have to do some processing with it, which means it absolutely has to slow down.”By putting the security function in the middle of the solution, Blue Coat executives said its ProxySG product can achieve the same throughput as if the security weren’t there.
Hicks-Frazer offers the analogy of airport security: “You can get to the plane much quicker if you took the security out of the way, but we would never do that.” Instead, he said, what could speed things up is giving passengers a thorough initial screen to determine trustworthiness. Passengers who pass would not need to go through the rigorous screening process on their subsequent trips.
“The big difference between what we do and what happens in an airport is the [passenger] comes in and flies away, but with us, we have a community of users requesting content ... literally the same content. As we bring it in once, we make sure that it’s safe and serve it to the user. When the user’s friend asks for the same piece of content, rather than going through the whole scanning process, we serve it very quickly.”
Hicks-Frazer said the net effect of having this sort of “control point” is greater speed.
“[Application acceleration] is about connecting the right user to the right applications at the right time to give them the right quality of service for that interaction,” said Hicks-Frazer, explaining that you need to connect security and acceleration. “First, you have to check that this guy is allowed to do what he wants to do, and if he is allowed to do it, to accelerate the bejezus out of it. Trying to do that in a dual infrastructure, it falls down; it falls to pieces.”
Traditionally, addressing application optimization and security called for two different technologies and two suppliers. “This often resulted in conflicting technical requirement and complicated deployment and management demands. Different technical staffing and in-house knowledge was also often required to make these technology work together, which further drove up costs,” according to the white paper, “Optimizing Managed Service Delivery with Secure Application Acceleration,” by THINKstrategies Inc.
