Blue Coat Systems introduced new updates for Blue Coat PacketShaper appliances that enable businesses to embrace Web, cloud and mixed-use recreational applications on the corporate network while providing a user experience for maximum employee productivity.

The newest advances for PacketShaper appliances provide visibility into Web applications and operations as well as the group and user-level policies that allow businesses to gain control over the shadow IT infrastructures that arise from the introduction of applications onto the corporate network without IT’s knowledge.

Increasingly, employees look to Web and cloud-based applications to increase their productivity, yet IT typically cannot see or control these applications. As a result, they can consume a disproportionate amount of corporate bandwidth and impact the performance of other mission-critical applications. The new PacketShaper enhancements include:

Granular application and operation visibility: PacketShaper appliances now classify Web, native mobile and mobile browser applications and their operations, providing businesses with a comprehensive, detailed view of traffic on the corporate network.

Group and user-level control: PacketShaper appliances now provide businesses with the ability to set granular group or user-level policies that assure a high quality experience for users that rely on Web and cloud-based applications to do their jobs.

Aggregate view of user-level activity: The new enhancements also provide an aggregate view of a user’s activity across all the devices they are using on the network, giving businesses the comprehensive information they require to set appropriate quality of service policies.

The granular application and operation controls combined with the ability to set quality of service policies at the user level allow enterprises to guarantee bandwidth for IT mandated Web and cloud-based applications and operations, resulting in a better user experience that will encourage adoption of preferred applications. For example, a business could prioritize the uploading and downloading of files from Box.com while limiting those operations for other online storage sites that the company hasn’t standardized on.

These new advances also provide businesses with a powerful tool for managing complex, mixed-use Web applications such as Facebook or YouTube. With user-level policies, businesses can provide employees in the marketing group with guaranteed bandwidth to upload videos. This granular control allows businesses to open their networks to mixed-use applications without compromising the performance of other mission-critical business applications.