Does WAN Optimization Belong in a Proxy?

Blue Coat Systems seems to believe so. Blue Coat is well known for their ProxySG product line, which according to their own press is used by 93 of the Fortune Global 100. Blue Coat is the former CacheFlow which made web proxy caches for forward and reverse proxy use. They moved into secure proxies during the dot com bust and during the last two years have integrated WAN Optimization into their ProxySG product line.


At first glance it seems like a real incongruity. What could these two networking products share in common? WAN Optimization is usually deployed internally, on two ends of a WAN link inside the corporate network, whereas the proxy has always been on the edge of the network guarding access to the Internet or providing security and scalability to the corporate web presence. And in fact in most organizations including your own, it's probably safe to say the administrator of the proxy isn't even the same group or same person as the one that's responsible for the WAN Acceleration device.

And in fact in many instances, although the same device can be used as both a proxy and a WAN Optimization device, it's deployed as one or the other and in different parts of the network.

Where this starts to change is when you look at the branch office. With WAN Optimization, in general you need to have a device on both ends of the WAN link. Many companies have traditionally back hauled internet access over the WAN link back to the corporate Internet link. As prices for internet drops continue to decrease, it's not unusual to see branch offices have their own drops to the internet. In this scenario, it makes sense to try and consolidate boxes at the branch office, and having the branch office proxy also serve as the WAN Optimization box, begins to have some value.

In companies that still back haul internet access over the WAN link, there's some value in having the WAN Optimization device at the data center also server as the proxy, protecting the branch office users from internet threats. But as internet links become more prevalent, you may be seeing more of this functionality at the branch office.