Blue Coat Addresses WAN Optimization for Cloud Computing

"The CloudCaching Engine, an advanced asymmetric acceleration technology, breaks the barrier that has prevented traditional WAN optimization solutions from optimizing most applications based in the public cloud. The CloudCaching Engine enables businesses to more readily adopt cloud infrastructure to achieve operational savings. Through efficient use of the cloud, companies can also meet the increasingly complex challenges of evolving communication and collaboration and enhance business processes for the distributed enterprise.

"Traditional WAN optimization solutions are designed to accelerate file and email traffic using a symmetric deployment of physical or virtual appliances in the branch office and data center. For those private cloud deployments, Blue Coat provides its Cloud MACH5 Virtual Appliance since a private cloud data center can accommodate a WAN optimization device symmetrically aligned with an appliance at the company's office. In a true public cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment, the infrastructure is not owned or managed by the customer, so it is not possible to co-locate a WAN optimization solution in such a cloud environment. This means cloud applications cannot be accelerated to users using traditional WAN optimization between two points. Blue Coat uniquely solves this problem by using its CloudCaching Engine to extend WAN optimization for acceleration of cloud-based applications, including those using video, Web-based interfaces and IPv6 content."