Blue Coat Lets PacketShaper Dig Deeper Into Traffic

The PacketShaper appliance has been around now for about 10 years. It has a healthy 10,000 customers (mostly very large to medium sized businesses as well as universities) with 50,000 appliances shipped globally.

PacketShaper is essentially a network box that sits in line with a business’s network traffic. It provides a deep level of visibility into the apps that cross the network and consume valuable bandwidth, including VoIP apps, enterprise software etc. It doesn’t look at the port level, it looks at the application level to automatically discover what applications are running on the network.

WebPulse essentially is a cloud database hosted in Blue Coat’s data centres around the world. It classifies new content as it arrives on the Internet, and has classified approximately 95 percent of the all the URLs around the world.

House explained that, in most organisations, there is a “grey area” of content, where applications that have traditionally been thought of as recreational are starting to used as business tools. "For example, organisations are now posting training videos onto YouTube, and are exploiting the power of Facebook and social networking in general," he said.