Blue Coat Systems has announced that Akibia, a provider of consulting and integration for data center, network and security services, has deployed Blue Coat ProxySG appliances at its headquarters in Westborough, Massachusetts and at six branch offices around the US to speed access to centralized files.
Before adding the Blue Coat appliances for WAN optimization, file access time was reported to be subpar by Akibia’s IT department, and impacted employee productivity.
In particular, important Excel files used by Akibia to quote projects took an excessively long time to exchange between a branch office employee and the centralized file server at the company’s data center. Akibia’s use of ProxySG appliances have made file access nearly instantaneous, according to Blue Coat Systems.
In addition, Akibia had been transitioning to a Microsoft SharePoint file system that was slow to access in branch offices over its existing WAN. To give each branch office direct internet access, Akibia adopted a direct-to-the-net model, which reduced bandwidth by eliminating the need to backhaul internet traffic to the centralized internet gateway in the company’s data center.
With the Blue Coat system, the same ProxySG appliance in each branch office serves both to protect the office from malicious threats resulting from a direct internet connection and to provide acceleration for acceptable web content and applications.
