Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances can monitor Twitter and enforce corporate IT policies

(06/08/2009)

According to statistics from Nielsen NetView, there were seven million unique visitors to Twitter in February 2009, an increase of 1,374 percent from February 2008. This increase is consistent with continued growth in enterprise adoption of social networking tools. According to a survey by Awareness, 75 percent of employees were already using social networking sites for business purposes in 2008, an increase of 15 percent from 2007. The same survey also found that 61 percent of businesses use social networking to improve communication and collaboration.

Blue Coat Systems, Inc. has announced that it has added Twitter to the applications that Blue Coat® PacketShaper® appliances can discover, monitor and control. With the ability to identify more than 600 applications, PacketShaper appliances enable enterprises to gain a comprehensive understanding of how employees utilize social networking tools and set policies to manage them.

“Understanding which social media tools are being utilized and how employees are using them is valuable information that helps network administrators set and enforce corporate policies,” said Steve House, Director of Product Marketing at Blue Coat Systems. “Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances provide the visibility, actionable intelligence and control that enable enterprises to fully realize the value of their network investments.”

Using Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances, enterprises have the ability to see and control Twitter, which allows them to set appropriate IT policies to either enable or control collaboration. PacketShaper appliances can identify and classify more than 600 applications and can monitor more than 100 metrics per application session. This in-depth visibility enables network managers to limit the impact of recreational applications and optimize the performance of business applications by applying granular controls such as bandwidth guarantees, limits, prioritization and other quality of service mechanisms.

With the visibility provided by PacketShaper appliances, network managers can set and enforce corporate IT policies to optimize and accelerate business applications and block or limit non-business applications. Blue Coat offers unmatched visibility into the performance and security of applications running across the network, providing enterprises with the control they need to contain costs, enhance business productivity and quickly respond to changing business requirements.

Related topics:  Internet and Web security   Network Security 

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