P&N Beverages is claimed to have reduced remote access times to large Microsoft Office files from as much as 20 minutes to under 60 seconds, using the Blue Coat Application Delivery Network infrastructure.

P&N Beverages is a major supplier of generic supermarket brands and markets its own products including True Blue, Wicked, Pop Tops, P&N Juice, Brekky Juice, LA Ice Cola, Pub Squash, Waterfords Mineral Water and Frantelle Spring Water.

The company has deployed the Blue Coat ProxySG appliances for optimising and securing the delivery of business applications to more than 700 employees distributed across 10 locations, a step expected to save P&N Beverages $A100,000 a year in bandwidth costs.

After P&N Beverages consolidated its information and applications from numerous locations into a centralised data centre, it took Excel and PowerPoint users in its branch offices as much as 15-20 minutes to open large files traversing the WAN.

With the use of ProxySG appliances, access times decreased to under 60 seconds. Blue Coat ProxySG appliances have also significantly improved the performance of the company's Microsoft Exchange Server, Internet access and network printing services. In addition, the same appliances provide a strong first line of defence against Web-based threats.

"By dramatically reducing access times, the Blue Coat application delivery network solution became indispensable to our branch offices users," said Joe Esposito, national IT manager for P&N Beverages. "At the same time, ProxySG appliances provide our users with continuous protection from unrated websites and even from good websites compromised by malware."

To protect against Web-based threats and other dangerous content, including inappropriate websites and downloads, P&N Beverages deployed Blue Coat WebFilter in conjunction with ProxySG appliances. WebFilter works in tandem with the Blue Coat WebPulse service, a collaborative cloud-based defence, that analyses and categories unknown content and links. The discovery of malware by one of more than 62 million users immediately protects all users, providing protection against emerging threats.

In a competitive evaluation conducted by P&N Beverages, Blue Coat WebFilter delivered more effective protection against new and emerging threats and more accurately categorised and rated unknown Web content and links. By accurately categorising new content, the Blue Coat solution enables P&N Beverages to consistently enforce and measure compliance to its corporate IT policies to content being accessed by its employees. The ProxySG appliances enable network administrators to apply policies on a granular basis, including by user, content, time of day, group or any other combination of more than 100 categories.

The Blue Coat Application Delivery Network infrastructure delivers visibility, acceleration and security. By understanding the traffic flowing across the Wide Area Network or Internet gateway, network administrators can accelerate business-critical applications or content, stop malicious threats and apply controls accordingly.

"With Blue Coat's combination of Web security and WAN optimisation, you have a single vendor integrated approach which simplifies things for the customer and reseller," said Mikhael Haidar, CEO for Networx Australia, which provides fully managed secure Internet services to P&N Beverages and maintains its network.

"Blue Coat appliances simultaneously resolve application latency issues, reduce bandwidth consumption and deliver security and control, enabling P&N to improve the continuity of its business operations."