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anaged M Services
on ed Solutions Editi Blue Coat Manag
Nancy Conner
The changing workplace and new era of IP-based networking means that more applications are competing for limited network resources. This is powered by the significant growth in adoption of collaborative applications and services, including next-generation voice, video, Web conferencing, and other bandwidth-hungry real-time applications. Unfortunately, IT organizations are struggling to support these collaborative applications in an era of declining budgets. Many IT organizations lack the resources, both in staff and equipment, to manage application performance. As a result, many businesses are turning to Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to reduce operational and deployment costs, and leverage the skill sets of the MSPs. Thats where working with a Blue Coat MSP comes in. As early as 1998, Blue Coat had a vision for where business was heading. As the world became more global and collaborative and more dynamic and decentralized, Blue Coat developed an infrastructure designed to support and enhance the changing WAN environment. The resulting Blue Coat infrastructure combines three core technologies: visibility, acceleration, and security, the core components of building an Application Delivery Network (ADN). In the WAN world, you need these three technologies working together to provide the comprehensive application and user control required to contain costs, enhance business productivity, and respond to ever-changing threats. In a global business environment, the WAN is the center, allowing users to be productive at any time, in any place. In the meantime, organizations have found that setting up and maintaining a secure, fast, reliable network is difficult and expensive to do. Managed Services For Dummies will help you identify and address todays most difficult networking and resource challenges. We hope youll discover that working with a Blue Coat MSP is a powerful solution that provides your business with a fully optimized and cost-efficient network. If you have any questions, we stand ready to help. Sincerely, Craig Hicks-Frazer VP Service Providers Blue Coat Systems, Inc.
Managed Services
FOR
DUMmIES
by Nancy Conner
These materials are the copyright of Wiley Publishing, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
These materials are the copyright of Wiley Publishing, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Introduction
elcome to Managed Services For Dummies, Blue Coat Managed Solutions Edition. In a global business environment, wide-area networks (WANs) have taken center stage, letting companies do business around the world, using employees in offices dotting the globe. Many enterprises find it both difficult and expensive to manage and optimize the WAN to ensure business operations run smoothly and securely. Doing so requires ongoing investments in hardware, endless updates, and staff training. Wouldnt it be better to have your IT staff work on core business concerns than to spend their time managing the network? And arent security, reliable applications, and visibility essential to your network? Thats where managed services come in. A reliable managed service provider (MSP) has the expertise and equipment to optimize and monitor your network and deliver applications efficiently and safely. And instead of requiring upfront capital expenditures, managed services let you shift network costs to the operational side of things, paying for what you actually use (instead of what someone thinks you might need).
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Foolish Assumptions
For this short overview, we made a few assumptions about you, the reader: Youre no dummy. If you werent smart, you wouldnt be interested in improving the performance of the applications on your WAN in the first place. Youre an IT decision maker. Youve heard at least a little about managed services, and youre super-interested in what it can offer your organization. You may be a managed service provider. You want to make it clear to your current and potential customers why managed services are a good idea, and you want to help them move from basic WAN services to a spectrum of value-added services, such as WAN acceleration and managed security services. Youre also interested in what Blue Coat solutions have to offer you. You speak tech. Although we make a point of defining terms and spelling out acronyms, this book assumes that you have a general familiarity with computer lingo.
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Chapter 1
anaged services are on the rise. In fact, theyre poised for explosive growth. According to analysts, by 2013, the managed services market is expected to reach approximately $34 billion. Currently, an estimated 67 percent of firms use managed services to reduce costs. And an analyst research firm predicts that security applications delivered as cloudbased services will more than triple by 2013. Sounds like something you should know about, doesnt it? This chapter gets you up to speed with managed services: what they are, where they came from, and most importantly what they can do for your business.
These materials are the copyright of Wiley Publishing, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
These materials are the copyright of Wiley Publishing, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
These materials are the copyright of Wiley Publishing, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
These materials are the copyright of Wiley Publishing, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Fortunately, todays MSPs can address the challenges of optimizing network performance while keeping the network secure. Chapter 2 shows how application delivery networks combine visibility, acceleration, and security to optimize the WAN.
These materials are the copyright of Wiley Publishing, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Table 1-1
Dedicated
Hybrid
SaaS
These materials are the copyright of Wiley Publishing, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Chapter 2
or service providers, application delivery may sound simple, but theres a lot more to it than simply making sure that SaaS applications make their way from the cloud to your employees desktops. Service providers are now in a better position to deliver these services thanks to better technology: When you can see and prioritize each application, then delivering critical applications more efficiently is easier. In this chapter, you find out how Application Delivery Networks combine visibility, acceleration, and security to provide fast, secure delivery of business-critical applications using existing bandwidth.
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to do their thing. No matter where users are working at a branch office, from home, or on the road businesscritical applications should perform as well as they do at headquarters. Your users expect it, and your business depends on it Security: These days, security is a multifaceted issue. You have to guard against malware, attacks, information leaks, information theft. Its a wild n woolly world out there, and you have to be ready for anything. Covering just one or two of these issues isnt enough. Fortunately, Blue Coats approach to ADN managed services has you covered in each of these three crucial areas.
Visibility
Seeing is more than mere believing; its key to knowing whats on your network. Only then can you set policies and become a traffic cop to control whats passing across your network. When you gain visibility into the network, you get these advantages: See all the traffic on your network. In any large distributed enterprise, hundreds of applications use the network for communications every hour of every day. Your employees need only some of these applications to do their jobs. Others, such as Hulu or iTunes, are recreational and probably have no business value. And downright dangerous stuff, such as malware, is always knocking at your networks door. Visibility lets you discover and classify what you do want from the productivity-sapping (and even dangerous) traffic you dont want. With Web-based content, visibility is key to get the most out of MPLS. As more local WAN traffic moves out onto the Internet, visibility is key in getting the most out of MPLS. Keep an eye on end-user experience. Your employees expect applications to have the same quality experience as if on a LAN. So visibility means more than just knowing that business-critical applications are on the network; it means having the intelligence to proactively assure that even real-time traffic is uninterrupted.
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Acceleration
Your goal is simple: Keep business-critical applications running quickly and smoothly, while slowing or blocking everything else. But thanks to the variety and sheer number of applications on the network, achieving that goal can be tricky. Consider, for a moment, the different kinds of applications that run on your network. Youve got internal bulk applications (such as e-mail and file access), external applications (corporate training videos and SaaS apps, such as Salesforce.com and Google Docs but also online games and other recreational apps), and real-time applications (such as video conferencing, VoIP, and credit-card transactions). To make things more complicated, your enterprise may have multiple locations around the globe. All those applications and branches require a flexible approach to optimizing your WAN. Plus, with data consolidation and compliance, you need acceleration to give users a LAN-like experience, no matter where they happen to be. To make sure that your employees, wherever they happen to be, have access to the applications they need, you need acceleration that includes Byte and object caching: Caching speeds up the network by storing data or an entire object in a local cache and then sending a token over the network in its place. Compression: This technique minimizes file services data going over your WAN by using an algorithm to take out predictable information before the data gets sent. At the other end, the same algorithm puts that info back in place. Compression saves bandwidth and backhaul costs.
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Bandwidth management: Prioritize secure Web (HTTPS) interactions between applications, content, and different users and groups. The priority you assign affects when traffic gets sent and how much bandwidth the traffic uses. Protocol optimization: How chatty are the protocols on your network? Protocol optimization parallelizes communication that traditional travels serially, making those chatty applications more efficient and improving response times.
Security
The Web is changing. Thanks to SaaS applications and cloud computing, more business content is crossing the Internet or being stored on the Web. Sites such as YouTube may be used for legitimate business purposes as well as time wasting. And even trusted Web sites may be harboring hidden malware. With so much HTTP traffic, port 80 is a wide-open door into your network. And because not all Web traffic is equal, its essential to have a security solution that classifies that traffic, knowing what to accelerate, what to treat as run-of-the-mill, and what to keep out. MPLS+ has you covered. They say, You snooze, you lose, right? The bad guys certainly arent sleeping. Theyre constantly looking for new ways into your network. In fact, 2008 saw the discovery of about 16 million new kinds of malware. And that means your security strategy needs to address known threats while evolving quickly to be ready for potential threats before they hit. For example, viruses used to sneak into your network via e-mail attachments. That threat still exists, of course, but thanks to the rise in business-related HTTP traffic, hackers got the idea of injecting malicious code into legitimate Web sites. In fact, 90 percent of malware now comes from download pointers hidden in popular Web sites that people think they can trust. As more businesses embrace cloud computing and subscribe to SaaS applications, its more important than ever that Web access is both reliable and secure. Thats where MPLS+ comes in. An ADN with MPLS+ will help you control the applications and content that come in from the Web, give you visibility and control over SSL (the secure socket layer), and prevent data from leaking out of your network.
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These materials are the copyright of Wiley Publishing, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Chapter 3
managed services
Discovering what application-aware SLAs can do for your business
any a business deal has been cemented on the basis of a simple handshake. But when it comes to managed services for the network your business depends on, a handshake isnt nearly enough. Managed service providers and customers use service-level agreements to define what customers can expect. Just as managed services are evolving (see Chapter 1), so are the SLAs that govern those services, as this chapter explains.
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These materials are the copyright of Wiley Publishing, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
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What does an application-aware SLA look like? It might, for example, measure application availability based on what percentage of the time a specific application is available, through measures such as these: The number of transactions attempted and responded to The number of successful attempts to connect with a server Granular reporting capability on application availability at specified increments
Real-Time Reporting
From the customers point of view, application performance and network security are what count. MSPs that offer applicationaware SLAs have a real advantage in setting themselves apart from the pack and meeting customer expectations. When youre trying to keep applications running smoothly and manage security, real-time reporting offers a big advantage, letting you address performance slowdowns and security threats as they happen. So to satisfy user expectations, smart MSPs are delivering reporting solutions.
Performance
Nobody installs and maintains a network just for the fun of it. Rather, a network is the infrastructure that supplies the applications and data the business needs. If end-users are sitting around drumming their fingers on the desk waiting for a slug-
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Security
When it comes to security, just a little late is too late. Security has to happen in real time. And so does security-related reporting. An ADN offers security capabilities that include filtering Web requests and content, Web virus scanning, malware detection and quarantine, content and certificate validation, data-leak prevention, SSL traffic inspection, and control of iffy traffic such as instant messaging, peer-to-peer sharing, and streaming audio and video. The Blue Coats approach to ADNs, emphasizing visibility, acceleration, and security, offers a suite of technologies that makes it possible for MSPs to incorporate service levels for performance, security, and reporting into application-aware SLAs.
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Chapter 4
e can come up with a whole lot of reasons to switch to ADN managed services. This chapter lists ten or so of the best.
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to your business, while slowing down or blocking everything else. An ADN can optimize legacy applications over the WAN and deliver a host of SaaS and Web 2.0 applications securely and reliably.
Enhance Security
Your companys digital assets customer lists, trade secrets, financial data are some of its most valuable, and you need
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