Easy as ABC

In today’s world, it’s almost as if you can’t live without the Internet. Aside from the e-commerce aspect, which gives small boutiques the ability to compete with national chains, the web has allowed us to streamline our processes, conduct global meetings from the comfort of our offices and make just about everything easier. But it has also opened up an unfortunate can of worms: viruses, spyware and web-based fraud.

To cut down on these less-desired aspects, ABC Supply, a wholesaler of exterior building products, installed a series of security applications to manage web usage, reduce bandwidth consumption and protect against malware (malicious software) at its 400 locations.

Darrell Cleaver, enterprise network manager for ABC, says the Blue Coat appliances his company installed two years ago have enabled ABC to regain control of the Internet as a vehicle for business and given it the means to intelligently apply business controls.

Blue Coat “scans the traffic off the website to make sure there’s not a virus on it,” Cleaver says. “It’s our proxy server, as well as our content filter and A/V scanner.”

When ABC installed the Blue Coat applications, the individual stores were mostly on dial-up and employees would unknowingly download viruses. “Now they can’t do that,” Cleaver says, and the result is “we spend a lot less time cleaning systems off. We don’t have that person who gets an e-mail, clicks a link and downloads a virus to his machine.

“When you look at the logs, you’d be surprised at how many sites have embedded viruses,” Cleaver says. Blue Coat also serves as ABC’s content filter, “which is really nice, because you can just turn off all streaming [content] and you don’t have to worry about blocking all the YouTube-type sites and all the radio sites” that “were eating up our bandwidth.”

Cleaver has also appreciated the fact that he can monitor web traffic. With about 1,500 computers being used systemwide, it’s imperative that ABC be able to observe the sites its employees are frequenting. “If someone calls and says their system is slow, you can see exactly what the [employees] are doing,” he says.

Pleasant surprise
The good news for ABC is the fact that eight out of the top 10 most-visited URLs are vendor-ordering websites. That was a pleasant surprise, Cleaver says.

“One of the main drivers for putting our systems in place was to improve our ability to order online,” he says. Staff “used to sit with drafting paper and draw out the windows and place an order through a catalog they had in their hands. Now they can do it all online.”

ABC Supply also discovered that a small fraction of its staff was misusing the Internet. Through activities such as downloading 180 megabytes of music or accessing and updating an outside e-commerce storefront, a handful of employees were hogging bandwidth and slowing everybody else’s work-related, revenue-generating activities.

Employees can be downloading viruses and not even know it. Carrie Oakes, vice president of product and technical marketing for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Blue Coat, says the most commonly used websites have spyware on them. That’s why it’s highly important that any operation employing a server apply the appropriate security protocols, she says.

Today’s malware “does not come from spam or phishing.” It’s coming from “websites that people trust,” Oakes says. “There’s been injection of viruses and spyware onto those sites and without being able to understand the transaction and be able to read through the whole website and validate it before it’s actually given to the end user, we’re able to strip out all of the bad things that are associated with the site but still deliver the goodness of what they were going there to look at in the first place.”

Scaling web servers
In addition to providing visibility into a company’s Internet access, moderating bandwidth consumption and improving security, Blue Coat can scale web servers so clients don’t have to keep buying new/additional ones. Retailers “can actually put us in front of [the server] and we can do a lot of the off-loading, both from an SSL perspective as well as a content perspective, but without having to hit the web servers on every single request,” Oakes says.

Another client, process automation and asset management solutions provider R.E. Mason, has deployed Blue Coat ProxySG appliances for a combination of WAN optimization and web security. The same ProxySG appliance that speeds file access in the branch office also enables that office to access the Internet directly by providing integrated web security and policy control.

According to R.E. Mason’s website, Blue Coat ProxySG appliances have increased the speed of remote file access by 200 to 300 percent, even over a relatively short distance of 150 miles. A Microsoft Word or Excel file that may have required 90 seconds to access in the branch office can now be accessed in approximately three seconds, the company says. In addition, R.E. Mason can boost the number, and improve the quality, of simultaneous remote terminal sessions.

Before installing the Blue Coat appliances, R.E. Mason could run two or three remote terminal sessions at one time. Now, the company can run up to 14 simultaneous remote terminal sessions without disruption.

Blue Coat optimized ABC Supply’s LAN links and learned that 40 to 60 percent of traffic was actually “back hall traffic going back to the main gateways at the core locations, so they would have new aps that they were rolling out and you find out that most of your network is being consumed by Internet traffic,” Oakes says.

“What ABC Supply was able to do is optimize that LAN link so that other applications have more priority. For instance, the Oracle ap or the CRM application that they’re using within their infrastructure is now getting the right priority.”