ETM partnership program
Launched in March 2015 the Blue Coat Encrypted Traffic Management (ETM) Ready Program with founder members CA Technologies, Cyphort, Damballa, Fidelis Cybersecurity, HP, Lastline, RSA, SafeNet, Inc. (now Gemalto), Venafi and VSS Monitoring now has 17 members.
The partnership program is critical to Blue Coat. By having the technology integration with partner appliances Blue Coat hopes to make their device invaluable to enterprise companies, especially large enterprise companies that are the Blue Coat target customers. So what is Blue Coat’s intention around the partner program?
Arandjelovic said: “By expanding the program itself we are trying to capture and codify as many use cases as possible to make this … as ready to plug in as possible. So when we do have customers with any installed bases of any of the technologies that we have as partnered solutions…there is a cookbook of instructions that is ready to make this work. “
The founding partners were important, with HP clearly a key partner for Blue Coat, however the newcomers bring a number of solutions that take the appliance to another level. Each partner product needs to be treated differently as Arandjelovic explained:
“Different products or solutions are going to be in different proximity. … Gemalto, with Safenet Luna, offer their HSM solution, technology that is around key security that is really important for large scale SSL deployments and key management. We sit much closer in the architecture. Solutions like Trend it’s more of a flow integration perspective where we make sure that managing that closed loop is secure.“
This latest announcement is not likely to be the last and while Arandjelovic would not be drawn on any specific companies that might become partners in the future, we specifically asked about IBM, who have a huge presence in the security market at the moment and are currently missing from the list.
Arandjelovic commented “I couldn’t speak to specifically to IBM at this point, there are definitely a number of other vendors in the lab. We want to make this as broad as possible.” It will be interesting and a huge win for Blue Coat if they are able to name them though.
The smart thing about this is that in appearing agnostic Blue Coat have created a solution that will appeal to many companies struggling with the challenge of inspecting SSL packets. Blue Coat believes that the strongest market will be around Finance, Government, Healthcare and Retail. It will not be exclusively confined to those sectors as the challenge is actually faced by all industry verticals. Startups no longer need to consider the added overhead of decryption by partnering with Blue Coat and can deliver specialist solutions to different industries.
One such area is DLP(Data Loss Prevention) and one of the new additions is Symantec, who have integrated their DLP solution with the Blue Coat appliance. Nicolas Popp, vice president, information protection, Symantec commenting on the certification said: “With SSL encrypted traffic seen as an attractive place to hide malware, it’s important for IT to gain visibility for such traffic in order to prevent data leaks and other malicious activity. Symantec Data Loss Prevention (DLP) helps customers identify and protect sensitive information. By integrating with the Blue Coat SSL Visibility Appliance, our customers will now have an additional option to easily identify and monitor sensitive data shared outside of the organization.”
Blue Coat has now integrated the platform with a broad set of 17 vendors. This should allow the appliance to be placed in many enterprises regardless of the third party security appliances they currently have. It will enhancer security by carrying out SSL decryption in a secure way and inspect more traffic than they have previously been capable of. Each partner company has integrated its solution to the Blue Coat SSL Visibility Appliance so that companies do not need to replace expensive clear text systems but merely upgrade them with the firmware that supports the integration.
For example Trend Micro whose CMO Kevin Simzer commented: “Trend Micro Deep Discovery provides unprecedented visibility throughout a customer’s network to mitigate next generation threats including targeted and zero-day attacks that can be delivered through encrypted communications.
Working in concert with Blue Coat’s SSL Visibility Appliance will apply Deep Discovery’s dynamic capability to analyze this traffic and ensure these sophisticated attacks are contained in virtually real time. This, in turn, will provide customers with additional peace of mind without compromising privacy or performance.”
(Next: Flexible Architecture)
