Blue Coat plans email, web sandbox for iPad

Security vendor Blue Coat has unveiled plans to release an iPad version of its cloud-based filter and anti-virus software early next year to tackle concerns over tablet use in corporate environments.

The app would provide SMTP-based email security, in-line anti-virus scanning and filtering for iPads deployed by enterprises.

It can be used with an existing Blue Coat gateway for VPN access to the corporate network.

The app would act similarly to the iPad web filter browser K9, currently offered by the firm, but provide access to corporate data as well as a filtered browser.

K9 is used on 220,000 laptops provided to NSW high school students as part of the Digital Education Revolution.

Blue Coat's Asia Pacific director of product and solution marketing, Jonathan Andersen, said the company was in beta test phase of the app internally and had begun discussions with some clients on deploying it more widely.

The app will also provide "standardised reporting" of employee web use across internal and remote devices.

"We find a lot of customers in Australia and New Zealand want a lot more visibility of what the user's doing... at a more granular and detailed level," Andersen said.

"The user today has so much power on the network - they can download all the applications they want, they can bring their own devices, the IT manager is struggling with what do I enable, how do I control that? The iPads and iPhones sort of just tail into that."

Australian enterprises using the app would be served primarily out of a gateway in Blue Coat's data pod in Sydney, launched earlier this year, but Andersen could not clarify whether all content sent to Blue Coat for verification would remain on-shore.

The cloud service has so far been adopted by clients as a single service for anti-virus and web filtering internally, as well as an additional service to an internally deployed gateway, with the cloud service providing remote access for laptops, he said.

"We're used to the mobile diverted to the remote worker concept, we just see adding Apple iOS to the cart as the next step in evolution," he said.

James Hutchinson travelled to Thailand as a guest of NetEvents.