31-08-2012, 03:31 PM
Blue Coat WebFilter
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Why Dynamic Content Filtering has Become Essential
Two billion videos per day are watched on YouTube. Twenty million videos are uploaded to Facebook every
month. Numbers like these make it clear that businesses of every kind need to control website access
and activities that involve web content and applications. Today’s users expect Internet access to any site,
including YouTube video sites and social networking sites with multiple applications. This challenges
organizations to ensure that best-in-class web security practices are in place. And they need to implement
acceptable use policies to protect the business from legal risks, ensure employee productivity, and manage
bandwidth consumption.
Content filtering plays a new and important role beyond dynamically inspecting content for malware.
It is now an essential for balancing user productivity, compliance requirements and bandwidth costs –
while giving users the level of web access they expect. As social networking and other interactive web
communications rapidly replace email and other conventional communications, businesses need – more
than ever – robust, granular ways to achieve Internet access control that satisfies policy requirements.
URL filtering is the linchpin of effective web access control, although URL-filtering databases are now
largely commoditized. Blue Coat WebFilter™, with its cloud-connected architecture and inputs from a
worldwide community of users, is best-in-class for web threat protection. But content filtering databases
have another key role to play: control of Internet use.
Selective content control or delivery
With dynamic web pages now hosting a myriad of content types, IT administrators need to provide access
to required content while blocking restricted content according to their acceptable internet use policy. (For
example: enable access to www.wallstreet.com – but deny access to the sub-link on job hunting.)
With the prevalence of social networking, businesses need to be able to access sections of social networking
sites for legitimate business activity while controlling the use of the many other attractions on these sites.
Mafiawars, for example, has over seven million active users – making it clear that companies need to
categorize games within Facebook, using multidimensional URL categorization, to exclude games from
social network access as their use policy dictates.
Granular reporting on all web usage
You can’t control what you can’t see. You need visibility into what your users are doing on the web. Strong
web filtering with a good categorization engine must be supported by strong reporting on user-based web
traffic. By combining accurate, granular web information with user information, you can get a comprehensive
view of web trends or user behavior, or correlate data to identify the needs of different groups of users. For
example: some businesses may employ an open policy, but discover from reports that video consumption of
YouTube is higher than expected. Alternatively, social media usage from the engineering group may become
a visible trend, causing you to think about productivity concerns, or possibly about controlling posting activity
to avoid unintentional data loss.
URL-filtering database coverage and classification accuracy are the most important factors in enforcing use
policy, securing Web content and providing granular reports of web usage. If one of these is lacking, web
access policies simply won’t work. You will not be able to provide the access users want with the control that
businesses need.
Rich Media Control
Video access and usage in businesses today is commonplace for both personal and business use. But
uncontrolled video usage can overwhelm a network and affect employee productivity. Popular sporting
and media events, such as World Cup Soccer or the upcoming 2012 Olympic Games, are common engines
of recreational video use. From a business perspective, podcasts are showing up in 50 different web site
categories, showing that even appropriate business video content can hobble a network.
An essential benefit that Blue Coat uniquely provides is a reduction in bandwidth consumed by video through
stream-splitting and multi-casting techniques that allow web-based video to be accessed once and served
many times to multiple users in real time. In addition, Blue Coat’s caching technology for web and video
content dramatically reduces bandwidth consumption and perceptibly improves web performance.
Blue Coat provides application-aware bandwidth management capabilities to control recreational web use
by combining the depth of WebFilter categorization with the strength of Blue Coat’s comprehensive policy
engine. For required web access control, the policy engine uses granular filtering database information to
identify video content from any source and block or control that video usage based on user, category, time of
day, and other usage types. As one example, throttling video content can allow online movie clips to receive
limited bandwidth while CEO podcasts can be prioritized.
Conclusion
The emergence of social media as the mainstream communications environment has driven business and
personal usage of many web 2.0 applications including video, email, chatting, and blogging. This creates a
business imperative to allow, but control, web 2.0 applications – most significantly social media usage.
In the current complex and dynamic web environment, achieving the required control of web access starts
with an accurate, dynamic and granular content filtering database. Blue Coat WebFilter content filtering,
powered by WebPulse, delivers the most accurate real-time URL ratings in the industry. The multidimensional
URL categorization supported by WebFilter works with the powerful policy engine in ProxySG
appliances and the Web Security Module to deliver the most comprehensive and user relevant policy and web
application controls available.