High level of concern over unmonitored, unmanaged SSL traffic.

Blue Coat Systems have announced that, according to a survey of over 300 enterprise security and networking professionals, in the USA encrypted Secure Socket Layer (SSL) communications between internal corporate employees and external Internet applications is "invisible" to the enterprise and comprises a "risk to the enterprise." Ninety percent of those surveyed identified SSL traffic as such a concern, and nearly 64 percent believed that not having control or visibility over this SSL traffic makes it difficult for the enterprise to comply with laws, regulations and policies over privacy and confidentiality.

The same survey in major European countries showed similar results, with 97 percent of respondents viewing uncontrolled SSL traffic as a risk to the organisation and 82 percent admitting that they had no visibility into SSL connections between internal users and external applications. 54 percent claimed that lack of such visibility made it difficult or impossible to fully comply with laws, regulations and policies governing privacy and confidentiality. Blue Coat recently announced the new SSL proxy functionality for its appliance platform to finally bring visibility into--and granular control over--SSL communications between internal corporate employees and external Internet applications. These SSL communications now represent a significant and growing percentage of corporate Internet traffic. Blue Coat's SSL proxy enables organizations to stop or manage employee use of rogue applications or anonymous Web surfing encrypted in an SSL session. It can also stop encrypted malware, including viruses and spyware, from infiltrating enterprise networks through encrypted tunnels. The SSL proxy can deny threats from secured phishing attempts that now utilise SSL explicitly as a cloaking mechanism.

www.bluecoat.com