Blue Coat Article Sample

Controlling Application or Content Flow Through Proxies at the Branch is not Necessary with a Control Point at the Datacenter or Gateway

False: Bandwidth management at the edge of your network improves your WAN in ways centralized control solutions cannot. Primarily, the limitation is one of location. In order to intercept your traffic and prioritize and secure according to policy, the centralized manager has to see the traffic. That limits the appliance to being inline with every WAN link at the core, or to low-level information like ports that don’t provide adequate visibility in a web-centric world. Secondarily, it assumes your network is impermeable at the edges. If you want to leverage the Internet at remote sites to reduce your backhaul – or if you have Internet access points you don’t know about – the control of a proxy solution at the edge provides you with the visibility to either safely pursue distributed gateways or protect from rogue access points.