Keeping an Eye on Multimedia Application Use

Network World reported this week on Blue Coat's new offerings for monitoring Multimedia Application use in the workplace. IT admins have routinely blocked or allowed video traffic based on corporate requirements and policies. There was a time you could easily claim video traffic from sites like youtube were recreational in nature and block it. Lately, though, there’s more and more legitimate business content, such as training videos, on YouTube, which makes it harder for IT admins and HR groups to make a blanket policy decision on what's allowed in the workplace.

Blue Coat Systems in their latest update, is trying to give its customers greater flexibility when it comes to application and bandwidth policies. By upgrading to Blue Coat’s newest version of their URL filtering software, called WebFilter, IT managers will have more granular control over Web-based multimedia applications and greater protection against Web-based threats. Ten new categories are now available in WebFilter, including six network usage-related and four security-related categories.

From Network World:

The goal is to give enterprises the tools to see how employees are really using Web-based applications and content, and then apply policies that don’t get in the way of important business activities, says Steve House, Director of Product Marketing at Blue Coat. “We’re getting more granular in our ability to understand Web traffic. More and more traffic is moving to the Web, including business traffic and recreational traffic,” House says. “We have really invested in understanding that and are using that information to make better decisions around how the network is utilized and how secure the environment might really be.”

On the multimedia front, Blue Coat added six new categories to WebFilter: media sharing, art/culture, Internet telephony, network errors, TV/video streams and radio/audio streams. With these new categories, companies can distinguish between the different types of multimedia applications so they don’t adopt inflexible traffic policies that limit productivity.

Another new feature is the ability to differentiate long radio and video streams from short streams that are less than 15 minutes. This lets a business allow shorter audio/video clips during normal business hours but only allow bandwidth consuming TV/video streams after business hours, for instance.

“There’s a very big difference between someone watching a two-minute training video versus someone going to Hulu and watching a TV show or two-hour movie,” House says. “Those things can definitely consume massive amounts of resources and are much more of a productivity drain.”

In addition, Blue Coat WebFilter can now assign URLs to up to four categories. For example, an online news publication could be classified in the news category, while the sports section of that publication could be classified under both the news and sports categories so a company could decide to restrict access to the sports section without blocking access to the entire news site.

On the security front, Blue Coat added four new categories designed to better filter Web-based threats associated with unwanted software, online meetings, translation sites and greeting cards.

“For a long time we’ve had the ability to block malware, but now we separately categorize the sites that are trying to instruct botnet-controlled computers, ones that have been infected,” House says. “If you can look and see [which computers] they’re trying to talk to, you can not only block it but also run a report to see who has been infected and turn that over to the IT group.”

Just a good reminder to keep our proxy software up to date, so we can take advantage of new features to make developing enterprise policy on the proxy easier.