Blue Coat Systems, Inc (NASDAQ: BCSI), the leader in WAN application delivery and secure Web gateway, today announced that First National Bank (FNB) in South Africa has deployed Blue Coat ProxySG and ProxyAVTM appliances and Blue Coat WebFilter to provide Internet security, policy control and acceleration of Web content for its more than 22 000 employees with Internet access.
FNB has chosen Blue Coat to manage employee Web usage; protect against malware, spyware and phishing attacks; accelerate content and reduce bandwidth consumption.
First National Bank (FNB), one of the leading South African banking and financial services organisations, has branches throughout the country, and provides full retail services across individual and commercial segments.
FNB required a single security solution that could ease the administrative challenge of controlling Web communications across different business units with individual domains; an infrastructure which the existing solution could not support.
At the same time, FNB was interested in accelerating Web content and reducing the amount of bandwidth consumed from its Internet gateway.
"Web security is a major concern for all organisations - and nowhere more so than in the financial services sector," said Edmund Fouche, information security specialist at FNB. "At the same time, we exist in an online world and depend on the Internet for conducting business. It is important to us to have the visibility and control to stop malicious or non-productive traffic and accelerate that which is important to our business."
"Blue Coat appliances uniquely combine Web security, policy control and acceleration to stop the bad and accelerate the good," said Craig Stewart, vice-president, EMEA, Blue Coat Systems. "We are proud to help First National Bank harness the power of the Internet for optimised business that is both safe and fast."
Blue Coat ProxySG appliances have been installed at the FNB data centre in Randburg, South Africa, as well as its disaster recovery site to ensure fault tolerance. The appliances incorporate Blue Coat WebFilter to enforce acceptable use policies and help manage employee productivity. Since ProxySG appliances integrate with authentication systems, they can identify individual user traffic and apply policy on a per-user basis.
Without effective controls, some applications can drain network resources and prevent business applications from functioning. FNB can now control streaming audio, video, peer-to-peer (P2P) and other bandwidth-consuming applications on a more granular basis. The ProxySG appliances educate users with contextual splash pages, warnings and alerts to communicate and enforce the bank's internal IT usage policy.
In addition to controlling Web applications and enforcing the acceptable usage policy, Blue Coat appliances provide protection from viruses, spyware and other malicious threats. Even Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypted traffic can be inspected for security or acceptability.
"We worked closely with FNB to match their business needs with a solution that would meet all of their objectives," said Morn'e Janse van Rensburg, security account manager at Dimension Data. "Our expertise in the Blue Coat platform enabled us to meet the full range of needs for security and control while also applying acceleration and bandwidth reduction."
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