As the federal government takes steps to deliver on its election promise to make the Internet safer, Blue Coat is investing in R&D to refine its security offerings.

Web security is a hot political issue and continues to appear in headlines as the Rudd government follows through on a pledge to protect children from pornography and other dangerous material online. In response, security vendors like Blue Coat are preparing for a surge in demand for their security solutions.

“In 2007 we had reasonably strong growth and we’re looking forward to future growth,” said Wayne Neich, country manager for A/NZ at Blue Coat. “Our aim is to restrict certain traffic from entering a network … basically we want to stop the bad, take the good and accelerate it.”

According to Neich, businesses want a more sophisticated security solution that maintains a high level of performance without the need to increase bandwidth. For this reason, Blue Coat has also chosen to specialise in WAN optimisation.

“Opportunity exists to help customers deliver a routed net infrastructure without turning up the bandwidth,” said Neich. “The router simply sees packets of data, it's not aware of what the application is and who the user is. We can tie this information together.”

Blue Coat is looking to expand in APAC and recently signed Computerlinks as its distributor in Australia.

“Computerlinks brings relationships with larger service providers,” said Niech. “It’s a growth period in Australia and it’s extremely timely to have them represent us here. They also provide a new partner base.”

Recently, the Web 2.0 phenomenon has presented a new set of challenges for security providers. Blue Coat aims to address these issues and ensure resources aren’t being drained by social networking applications.

“Facebook, for example, contains content rich media that uses a lot of resources,” said Niech. “Effectively, caching provides an immediate opportunity for service providers to reduce their costs by going to Web 2.0 sites and pulling down data. We’re putting caching back into gateways at a time when bandwidth is getting expensive.”

There have been concerns of late that the push to control content on the Internet may result in the infringement of certain freedoms, specifically in relation to access of information. Niech claimed that Australia is a long way from overly controlling the Internet and the implementation of a balanced solution hinges on education.

“There’s an extremely high demand for education in this area,” said Niech. "Kids are getting smarter and Australia has been lagging behind what’s been happening overseas, particularly in Europe."

Looking ahead to 2008, Blue Coat plans to increase its employee base from eight to ten staff. The vendor is also planning to recruit more channel partners in the region.