Secure content and application delivery specialists, Blue Coat Systems, have been selected to provide their proxy platform appliances to accelerate internet content to the N3 broadband network, maintained by BT.
The company has been deploying new proxy platform appliances with BT for the last six to nine months to accelerate content to the millions of NHS staff who use the service on a daily basis.
Blue Coat’s vice president for international marketing, Nigel Hawthorn, told E-Health Insider: “The new appliances are bringing big benefits to NHS users of the N3 network. As well as providing increased security, it is also providing a more accelerated connection and reducing the amount of WAN bandwidth used, as more and more trusts use web-based systems.”
Enhanced performance from the N3 service when using the new devices has led to reduced response times, improved performance of applications and faster file access. N3 is simultaneously receiving bandwidth savings of around 30%, which has enabled a greater return on the investment in the network infrastructure, Blue Coat claims.
Hawthorn said: “The devices work hand-in-hand with the gateway to provide access to the internet much more quickly than before. This helps to ensure work can be done quickly and efficiently and Connecting for Health are receiving bandwidth savings.
“Using the devices, web traffic can be cached so that for every website visited, the information presented is saved and when it is next logged onto, providing the information is still up to date, the website can be delivered from our own source and not the internet. This is especially useful with sites used for clinical reference on a regular basis.”
Based on a custom, object-based operating system with integrated caching and compression, these proxy appliances leverage existing authentication systems to enable flexible policy enforcement on content, users, applications and protocols.
The N3 operations centre routes internet traffic to and from health care provider offices and primary care trust groups through its internet gateway, and Blue Coat appliances are deployed in-line at this primary gateway to speed content delivery and decrease bandwidth consumption.
The N3 internet gateway has a current capacity of 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps), but it is expected to scale to 2.5 Gbps as demand increases.
Blue Coat have also agreed a deal with BT allowing trusts to invest in devices for further services such as data encryption, filtering and devices to make cross-network functionality faster.
“Budgets are always tight and it’s great to see people have choices how they buy products. They can either buy devices outright or get them from BT under a BT managed services contract. It is especially useful for the encryption of patient data, which is essential and can even help with ensuring fast, high quality video conferencing over the N3 network,” the company says.
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