From the 'Faster' files:

A big emerging trend in enterprise IT this year has been the move to the Cloud, for almost everything. One particular area where I'm seeing a strong use of a hybrid cloud/on-premise model is for security and one of the chief proponents of that model is enterprise IT vendor Blue Coat (NASDAQ: BCSI).

This week Blue Coat announced the release of new ProxySG and ProxyAV web gateway appliances and the Web Pulse cloud service that complements them both. 

The Blue Coat ProxySG network gateway appliances now support up to 60,000 users in a single appliance which is a whole lot of power and overall they're claiming a 5x performance gain over their previous generation. The bulk of the improvements in speed come by way of multi-core related threading and optimizations.

I spoke with Blue Coat's Chief Scientist Mikko Valimaki about the new releases and he was keen on pointing out how important the cloud element is to the overall solution.

Blue Coat has a cloud security service called WebPulse which does some interesting real time threat analysis. In addition to being part of Blue Coat's enterprise products, it's is also freely accessible by home users by way of Blue Coat's K9 security service.