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Top 10 Federal Computing Thoughts
While the IT landscape is changing, becoming at once more centralized and more varied (with the development of Web services, mesh networks, SaaS, and so on), the principal challenges for network and security teams come down to security, visibility and acceleration.
Application Visibility in Federal Networks
No matter where you serve in government, all federal agencies face the same IT challenges. Each department must provide secure access to critical data and enable inter-agency collaboration through reliable, high quality voice and video applications.
Balancing Social Networking with Network Security Objectives in a Government Environment
With the explosion of other options for social networking, interaction and collaboration, email has lost its position as the primary Internet-based communication tool. In fact, The Wall Street Journal reported that there were more social networking accounts than Webmail accounts in 2009. Today, users rely more on blogs, tweets, social networking posts and even video clip communications to enrich information exchange, even in the government sector.
Innovation breeds opportunity, even for the underground. Web and mobility innovations focus on ease of use, availability, and building large user audiences, but they breed opportunity for cybercrime. Security typically comes later, after a period of breaches and security issues put the issue front and center. Halfway through 2011, we are in the midst of this security period.
Blue Coat Systems 2012 Malnet Report
Malnets (malware networks) are extensive infrastructures embedded in the Internet that are designed to deliver mass market attacks to the largest possible audience on a continuous basis. In 2012, Blue Coat expects these infrastructures will be responsible for more than two-thirds of all malicious cyber-attacks.
Blue Coat has identified its Top 5 recreational traffic disruptors – applications and content sites that employees access at work – that take up valuable WAN and Internet bandwidth, and disrupt the performance of mission critical enterprise applications. On uncontrolled enterprise networks, Blue Coat estimates between 30-60% of bandwidth is consumed by personal recreational use of applications.
Protecting Agencies Against a Powerful New Cyber Threat
On the front page of The New York Times (October 12, 2012), Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned of a potential “cyber-Pearl Harbor that could cause physical destruction and loss of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation.”
SSL Proxy & Interception: Blue Coat ProxySG SSL Capabilities
With the web browser being the most pervasive application used today, HTTP encapsulated in SSL (HTTPS) is the most widely used and adopted secure protocol used today. Its ease of deployment and use, & increased use in cloud services, has introduced additional security concerns. In the end, what you cant see can hurt you.
When considering SSL security for Web traffic, the Blue Coat ProxySG offers an extensive set of SSL capabilities for controlling and protecting both the users traffic and the application. ProxySG can be configured as a Reverse or Forward Proxy server. Reverse Proxy is an implementation for protecting your server and/or content, such as SharePoint or Outlook Web Access for example. Forward Proxy enables protection and control for users accessing the Internet or Intranet services. The major advantage of Forward and Reverse proxy, is the capability of the ProxySG to un-encrypt SSL traffic, enforce policy and perform elaborate techniques to protect and optimize the customers experience.
Network Analysis and Control Blue Coat Packet Shaper
A famous philosopher once said: “Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy”. I am a firm believer of making it easy when managing the difficult. IT professionals often search for answers related to identifying problems in their network and troublesome network based applications.
Blue Coat Systems offers a content aware & network visibility tool, called the Packet Shaper to aid in the insight and control of network based applications. Fundamentally, the Packet Shaper is deployed inline with your traffic, where it will recognize (classifies) traffic, sub classify web based traffic, extend QOS control & mapping per class, enabling prioritization of mission control data using shaping technology, and presents a graphical reporting engine for all flows traversing through the appliance.
