Infotech Lead America: Blue Coat Systems, a provider of Web security and WAN optimization solutions, has acquired the SSL appliance product line from Netronome, a company specializing in flow processing technologies.
Blue Coat’s acquisition of Netronome SSL appliances will help Blue Coat enhance its product line to deliver a safe and productive Internet experience for enterprise organizations. It will help customers add SSL flow analysis capabilities.
Netronome SSL appliances deliver SSL decryption in networks ranging from 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps full duplex, providing enterprises with visibility into the traffic on their network.
“Increasingly, analytics is an important tool for analyzing advanced threats and avoiding data loss,” said Christian Christiansen, vice president of security products and services at IDC. “To be effective at analytics, enterprises need to inspect traffic that flows through their network. SSL is one of the more important traffic flows. Blue Coat ‘s acquisition of the Netronome technology enables customers to add this analytics capability by providing inspection capabilities at scale.”
Web and SSL traffic can account for more than half of all traffic on the corporate network, driven by the adoption of cloud-based SaaS applications and the growing use of HTTPS for Web sites such as Google and Facebook. This type of encrypted traffic, left uninspected, can hide threats or other malicious activities.
To effectively implement security protections before the traffic reaches the endpoint, it is important for enterprises to have in-network visibility into encrypted traffic.
“Many networks face a crisis today as the rise in SSL-based traffic creates an unrealistic reliance on the endpoint to detect threats or data loss,” said Greg Clark, CEO at Blue Coat Systems. “By analyzing SSL traffic within the network, corporations substantially reduce risk.”
Once the Netronome SSL appliances are fully integrated with existing Blue Coat products, enterprises will be able to apply consistent policy to all traffic on the network.
“The SSL appliances are the industry’s highest performance transparent proxy for SSL network communications and provide unique visibility exposing inbound threats and outbound leaks,” said Howard Bubb, chief executive officer at Netronome. “The product is an ideal complement to Blue Coat’s comprehensive suite of security products and extends their leadership position in securing SSL communications.”
The Netronome appliances are currently available through certified OEM partners, including Sourcefire and VSS Monitoring, and will be available through authorized Blue Coat channel partners shortly. As part of the acquisition, the existing product team will join Blue Coat to provide uninterrupted support to existing customers and OEM partners.
In December BlueCoat also announced plan to acquire Crossbeam Systems to lay the foundation to transform the way businesses secure and optimize their networks.
Blue Coat and Crossbeam are portfolio companies of Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm.
