Blue Coat's Cloud Announcement

Blue Coat made an announcement this week that they were introducing a new cloud service, and would be demonstrating it at RSA next week. Their new service offering is provides another alternative to web security. While many enterprises will probably decide to stick with their web proxies, it's likely many smaller companies may choose cloud offerings for web security, due to the lower maintenance requirements and technical expertise necessary within their own organizations to deploy a cloud offering.

The big advantage to Blue Coat's offering is they bring a big name to this type of cloud service. Blue Coat's already well known for the secure web gateway appliances offering threat protection for web users, and that same protection is now available as a cloud offering.

Other choices in this area are Zscaler and ScanSafe (acquired by Cisco). It will be interesting to see how Blue Coat's offering compares, and whether companies will move to the cloud or stick with their appliances and proxies.