A new high-performance Web antivirus proxy program, ProxyAV, has been launched by Blue Coat Systems, aimed at bumping up the gateway performance of leading antivirus packages for businesses and cutting down the delays in network performance.
"The proxy appliance is the key to implementing high-performance Web antivirus at the Internet gateway," Blue Coat marketing vice president Steve Mullaney said at the rollout this week. "The combination of Blue Coat's ProxySG and ProxyAV appliances has made gateway Web antivirus deployable."
Described as an appliance that can bring up to 249 Mbps throughput and 4 millisecond average latency for real-time Web traffic virus scans, Blue Coat says ProxyAV can give organizations antivirus deployment with "scalable, high-performance options" aimed at meeting real time traffic requirements.
"With ProxyAV, we have been able to detect and prevent numerous viruses from infecting our network that would have bypassed our existing anti-virus security through personal Web e-mail and Internet file downloads," said University of Delaware senior telecom technologist Glenn Wright about the product. "ProxyAV solution is the first and only solution that has enabled us to turn on Web anti-virus without impacting our network performance, scanning Web traffic for viruses for more than 114,000 education users and 35,000 state users over a 200 Mbps connection to the Internet."
Blue Coat said gateway Web antiviruses are not deployed widely because of "unacceptable throughput and latency experienced with existing products," leaving information technology staffers challenged to compromise between user demand and security requirements when antivirus solutions slow response times for browser traffic.
"In many cases, performance issues interfere with customers' plans to install Web traffic virus protection that complements existing e-mail and desktop antivirus installations," said IDC Security Products vice president Chris Christiansen at the ProxyAV rollout. "Blue Coat developed an innovative approach to solving the Web antivirus performance problem by combining a proxy appliance, known for Web control and performance, with a dedicated anti-virus appliance optimized for scanning Web objects."
ProxyAV lets users pick between several top antivirus engines, including McAfee, Panda, Sophos, and Trend Micro, all of which give automatic updates. A system could have one antivirus defense across the distributed network and a different one at the Web gateway to join e-mail servers and desktops, Blue Coat said.
For more information including pricing, visit Blue Coat on the Web or call (408) 220-2200.
