Powerful Centralized Change, Configuration, and Policy Management
Powerful Centralized Change, Configuration, and Policy Management Director automates change, policy and configuration management. It enables enterprises to easily standardize the configuration of Blue Coat appliances creating policies that can be globally applied or customized by region or to a logical group of devices. By using a single point of administration, IT staff no longer needs to touch every device, maximizing productivity and allowing them to effectively manage new issues and threats in a timely manner.
Key management features include:
- Rapidly configure and deploy new devices
- Easily upgrade installed systems
- Centrally manage new policies and configurations by device, group of devices, or region
- Proactively manage your network to prevent problems
- Conserve valuable network resources with bandwidth policies and content pre-positioning
Configuration Management
With Director, you can rapidly deploy and configure new appliances. Using flexible configuration templates, administrators can standardize devices easily-yet customize them based on region or device-specific settings.
Director also automates software and license upgrades, allowing you to ensure version consistency and schedule updates during off-peak hours. Distribution sources can be located anywhere on the Internet or within an organizations intranet. With the combination of templates and overlays, you can ensure network consistency, as well as customize appliances by region or application. Director can centrally store configurations and coordinate their downloads from regionalized sources. For powerful automation, configurations can also be distributed and scheduled as CLI, scripted commands. Director also keeps backups of all ProxySG appliance configurations and policy settings, making it simple to rollback to known good configurations if a system problem does occur. Configuration snapshots can be scheduled, created before changes are applied, or based on standardized templates.
Policy Management
With Director, you can centrally create and manage content, appliaction and user access policies. The need to respond to new business requirements or make a policy change can occur at any time. When this occurs, updating all your secure proxy appliances immediately is critical. Administrators can use the BlueView Visual Policy Manager to create policy on the Director and distribute the change when it's needed, rapidly and effectively. Multiple policy templates can be stored and managed on the Director, making it easy to customize policies based on region, workgroup, or a myriad of other characteristics. For more advanced users, policies can also be automated and distributed based on the powerful Content Policy Language (CPL).
Resource Management
To conserve valuable network resources, Director allows you to create bandwidth policies and pre-position content on ProxySG series appliances. As part of a comprehensive bandwidth management strategy, proactively positioning high-bandwidth content such as streaming media or large static files allows enterprises to control the impact of those files on the network. Content can be distributed, prioritized and scheduled based on the complete range of policies supported by Director.
Proactively Monitor and Plan
Director also allows you to monitor device status and statistics from a centralized web-enabled GUI. With the addition of BlueView Reporter, you can run sophisticated reports on content security problems, usage patterns, and network traffic flows, allowing you to proactively evaluate and update your policies.
Easy to Deploy and Maintain
Optimized as a management appliance, Director can be remotely managed via both a graphical user interface (GUI) or command line interface (CLI). The GUI console allows easy management and fast deployment.
The CLI-which can be accessed via serial console, Telnet, or SSH-allows easily programmable automation, quick troubleshooting, and fast remote access, via secure network protocols.
