Big Switch Networks, a company bringing hyperscale networking to data centers worldwide, announced today that it's been certified to work with Blue Coat’s Encrypted Traffic Management (ETM).

Blue Coat’s ETM-Ready Certification is an integration of Blue Coat’s SSL Visibility Appliance and Big Switch’s Big Monitoring Fabric. The combination is designed to allow Blue Coat to build systems aimed at combatting the encrypted-traffic blind spot while preserving privacy, policy compliance, and the investment in the security infrastructure.

Today, as much as 70 percent of enterprise network traffic is SSL encrypted, according to Big Switch, and that creates a blind spot for various security tools. And with an increasing amount of attacks being malware hiding in SSL traffic, an infrastructure is needed to accelerate security services with specialized SSL visibility devices; this is what the combined SSL Visibility Appliance and Big Monitoring Fabric system aim to achieve.

Launched in August, Big Switch’s Big Monitoring Fabric handles traffic tapping and network visibility in an SDN architecture, making sure that traffic is getting to the right tool at the right time. Blue Coat’s SSL Visibility Appliance uses policy enforcement to inspect, decrypt, and manage SSL traffic while ensuring data privacy.

This integration enables policy-based insertion and chaining of security services in the demilitarized zone (DMZ). Big Monitoring Fabric redirects encrypted traffic to the SSLV, which decrypts SSL traffic for the benefit of security tools.

Photo: GotCredit on Flickr. CC2.0 license. Photo has been cropped.