Denver Health Deploys Blue Coat Proxy Appliances To Prevent Spyware
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Mar. 30, 2005 — Blue Coat® Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BCSI), a leading provider of proxy appliances, today announced that Denver Health and Hospital Authority is using Blue Coat proxy appliances to prevent spyware at the gateway and eliminate 25% of the organization’s help-desk calls.
Denver Health relies on computers and Web communications for its physician order entry system (POE), where doctors and nurses collect patient information at the beginning and end of patient visits. However, an increase in spyware infections across the Denver Health network was severely impacting this process, with more than 200 spyware infections identified on individual computers per month. This resulted in sluggish transactions for the POE system, and a steady stream of help-desk calls from frustrated doctors and nurses. Jeff Pelot, CTO for Denver Health, soon found his IT team fielding roughly 500 spyware-related help-desk calls a month from doctors and nurses.
“Network performance and availability is absolutely crucial to our organization, and spyware was impacting that performance to an intolerable degree,” said Jeffrey Pelot, CTO for Denver Health. “We estimated spending $170,000 a year in help-desk costs associated with time spent installing multiple desktop anti-spyware software packages.”
Denver Health contracted with Blue Coat to help control the spyware problem and is currently using its preventive gateway anti-spyware solution, which combines the Blue Coat ProxySGTM and ProxyAVTM appliances. The integrated, proxy-based approach controls “drive-by” installations, controls communications with known spyware Web sites, and scans Web content for known spyware signatures – all while enabling legitimate and necessary Web applications to install and function. Blue Coat’s solution also incorporates detailed reporting capabilities to help Pelot and the Denver Health IT team quickly identify infected computers for a targeted, more efficient clean-up.
“We are now able to stop ‘drive by’ spyware installations even when the spyware originates from an unknown Web site and when there is no known signature available to detect the malicious program,” said Pelot. “We have been able to nearly eliminate spyware from landing on our computers without hurting legitimate applications, and as a result, our help-desk calls have been drastically reduced.”
“Blue Coat’s proxy-based approach to preventing spyware at the gateway is extremely effective,” said Justin White with DirSec (www.dirsec.com), a Blue Coat reseller partner. “Sitting in the network between users and the Internet, Blue Coat proxy appliances are an ideal platform for enterprises interested in implementing security and control for any type of Web communications, whether its spyware prevention, IM control, Web anti-virus or Web filtering.”
About Denver Health
Denver Health, formerly known as Denver General Hospital, is the Rocky Mountain Region’s Level 1 academic trauma center, and the safety net hospital for the Denver area. The Denver Health system, which integrates acute and emergency care with public and community health, includes the Rocky Mountain Regional Trauma Center, Denver’s 911 emergency medical response system, Denver Health Paramedic Division, nine family health centers, 12 school-based health centers, the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center, NurseLine, Correctional Care, Denver CARES, Denver Public Health, the Denver Health Foundation and the Rocky Mountain Center for Medical Response to Terrorism, Mass Casualties and Epidemics. Denver Health has 398 beds, and has over 1.2 million patient contacts a year.
About Blue Coat Systems
Blue Coat enables organizations to keep “good” employees from doing “bad” things on the Internet. Blue Coat proxy appliances provide visibility and control of Web communications to protect against risks from spyware, Web viruses, inappropriate Web surfing, instant messaging (IM), video streaming and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing – while actually improving Web performance. Trusted by many of the world’s largest organizations, Blue Coat has shipped more than 20,000 proxy appliances. Blue Coat is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and can be reached at (408) 220-2200 or www.bluecoat.com.