Survey Shows High Level Of Concern Over Unmonitored, Unmanaged SSL Traffic In The Enterprise

SUNNYVALE, Calif., March 8, 2006 – Blue Coat® Systems (NASDAQ: BCSI), the leader in secure content and application delivery, today announced that, according to a survey of over 300 enterprise security and networking professionals, encrypted Secure Socket Layer (SSL) communications between internal corporate employees and external Internet applications is “invisible” to the enterprise and comprises a “risk to the enterprise.” Ninety percent of those surveyed identified SSL traffic as such a concern, and nearly 64 percent believed that not having control or visibility over this SSL traffic makes it difficult for the enterprise to comply with laws, regulations and policies over privacy and confidentiality. The survey participants were attendees of Blue Coat seminars in various US locations during the past several weeks.

The same survey in major European countries showed similar results, with 97 percent of respondents viewing uncontrolled SSL traffic as a risk to the organization and 82 percent admitting that they had no visibility into SSL connections between internal users and external applications. 54 percent claimed that lack of such visibility made it difficult or impossible to fully comply with laws, regulations and policies governing privacy and confidentiality.

“Enterprises have been completely blind to their users’ SSL traffic, and until now, have been unable to do anything about it,” said Steve Mullaney, vice president of marketing for Blue Coat Systems. “Our SSL proxy solution now enables enterprises to gain visibility and control over what has previously been invisible to them and protect against serious business risks.”

Blue Coat recently announced the new SSL proxy functionality for its appliance platform to finally bring visibility into – and granular control over – SSL communications between internal corporate employees and external Internet applications. These SSL communications now represent a significant and growing percentage of corporate Internet traffic. Blue Coat’s SSL proxy enables organizations to stop or manage employee use of rogue applications or anonymous Web surfing encrypted in an SSL session. It can also stop encrypted malware, including viruses and spyware, from infiltrating enterprise networks through encrypted tunnels. The SSL proxy can deny threats from secured phishing attempts that now utilize SSL explicitly as a cloaking mechanism.

Blue Coat’s proxy appliances have the unique ability to strike the optimal balance between user empowerment and IT control. Because a proxy terminates application protocols, it has comprehensive understanding of the user-to-application interaction and its context. As a result, proxy appliances provide IT with the power to define, enforce and audit intelligent policy controls over user/application interactions. By distributing proxy appliances at key points in an enterprise infrastructure – the data center, the gateway and regional/branch offices – organizations can create robust system architecture to protect, control and accelerate Web communications.

About Blue Coat Systems
Blue Coat helps organizations make the Web safe and productive for business. Blue Coat proxy appliances provide visibility and control of Web communications to protect against risks from spyware, Web viruses, inappropriate Web surfing, instant messaging (IM), video streaming, and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing – while actually improving Web performance. Trusted by many of the world’s largest organizations, Blue Coat has shipped more than 25,000 proxy appliances. Blue Coat is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and can be reached at (408) 220-2200 or www.bluecoat.com.

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