ARTFUL DEPLOYS BLUE LANE'S INLINE PATCH PROXY TO SECURE CRITICAL APPLICATIONS

Fifty Different Applications on Hundreds of Servers Are Protected by Blue Lane's PatchPoint System

CUPERTINO, CA, August 17, 2006 – Blue Lane™ Technologies Inc. today announced that Artful, the managed hosting services subsidiary of the Claranet Group - Europe's largest provider of IP services - is deploying Blue Lane's PatchPoint® inline patch proxy system to secure more than 500 servers in its Web application facilities to protect the business uptime of its 140 customers.

"As a service provider specializing in Web application facilities management, service quality and availability represent two key challenges. We take full responsibility for the production cycle of Web applications or outsourced IS and we are relying on Blue Lane's PatchPoint System to secure our customers' applications without interrupting service," said Olivier Beaudet, CEO of Artful.

Risks of Application Vulnerability Exploits or Service Interruption

Artful hosts many internet and intranet applications that use .Net or Java application engines, a favorite target of attacks that seek out and exploit security vulnerabilities. To address this threat, application vendors monitor security incidents and release corrective "patches" as quickly as possible. The question for a service provider like Artful then arises: Is it better to interrupt service in order to implement the security patch, or to let the application continue to run, aware that it is potentially vulnerable?

Until recently, Artful, like most other Web hosting vendors, straddled the fence on this issue, in the interests of protecting the availability of customer applications and databases. The time periods to deploy patches were regularly scheduled, typically once per month during periods of low traffic, at night, or very early in the morning. Available tools designed to automate the patch process were also of little help as they weren't able to provide an effective response to extreme emergencies or massive influxes of security patches from leading vendors. In these ever more common situations, emergency security patch deployments had to be scheduled with each customer, adding to the already significant demands on Artful's available resources. This would sometimes disrupt employees' schedules and would almost always result in unforeseen service interruptions.

Cortina, a data protection and security solutions specialist, presented the Blue Lane PatchPoint® solution to Artful. PatchPoint is a patch proxy deployed in front of application servers to emulate patch behavior on the network when it is either too costly or too risky to quickly install server security patches. The PatchPoint solution provides network application server security without the need to interrupt operations. Artful decided to test and evaluate the PatchPoint solution.

Successful Verification & Performance Testing Completed

After initial tests, feedback on the PatchPoint solution was very favorable, especially with regard to the one question Artful's teams felt had to be addressed: wouldn't adding an extra step for processing packets affect network performance? The answer was that the time required to process traffic flows was well less than one millisecond, so no noticeable operational latency was introduced.

As soon as a security patch becomes available, it is implemented right away and the application is automatically protected without the need for a service interruption. As a result, Artful gains the freedom to add the new security patch to the list of upgrades for the next scheduled system update. In addition, if a single PatchPoint-induced regression is observed, the administrator can immediately disable the offending patch using the PatchPoint Web user interface, ensuring the application remains available.

Full Deployment Underway with Security and Productivity Gains

Since these initial tests were completed seamlessly with the pilot customers, Artful is now deploying the PatchPoint solution to protect all of its nearly fifty different applications deployed on hundreds of servers.

The PatchPoint solution even helps Artful increase productivity. In addition to providing maximized protection and availability for the customer, Artful is able to observe considerable productivity margins for its technical teams who used to spend 70 % of their time patching embedded applications. Now, free from emergency-related constraints, they can focus on preparing and validating forthcoming corrective actions, thus increasing service quality.

"The Blue Lane patch proxies represent a technical lever while also being a sales lever because we are now able to tackle both security and availability instantly, which are two major concerns for our customers," Beaudet said.

In the past, an application could stay vulnerable for up to six months on average in the event of serious incompatibility issues between a patch and an older application.

"Now, regardless of the platform or the application, that time has been reduced to zero. This is not so much a gain in time as it is a gain in service quality. If we'd wanted to guarantee the same quality with the same type of problem-free approach but didn't have Blue Lane, we would've had to increase our resources considerably," Beaudet concluded.

About Artful and the Claranet Group

About Blue Lane Technologies Inc.

Blue Lane provides the industry’s first inline patch proxy for enterprise servers that fixes application-specific vulnerabilities at the root cause by checking for the same conditions and applying the same corrective action as the software vendor security patch. Solving the dilemma of “patch now or patch later,” the Blue Lane PatchPoint™ System instantly secures critical applications and preserves the uptime of the business while eliminating the cost and risks associated with unscheduled patching. Founded in 2002, Blue Lane is headquartered in Cupertino, California. For more information, contact the company at www.bluelane.com.