Companies with remote employees or that employ cloud applications can be kept safe from malicious intrusions through the use of a secure gateway, which operates as a conduit for all web-based traffic coming in and out. This kind of protective measure is essential.
When incoming traffic requests access to a site, the SWG solution inspects it against its list of allowed sites and security policies. It then grants the request only if it meets all requirements.
Scalability
With more and more work activities on the web, a secure gateway is critical to any layered security architecture. This is especially true today with the increased prevalence of cyberattacks and remote workforces.
To help protect against these threats, a secure web gateway SWG needs to have the ability to scale up and down to meet business requirements and growth without being constrained by hardware limitations. Look for a solution that offers appliance, cloud or cloud/appliance hybrid configurations with built-in load balancing and modular deployment.
A gateway that performs data loss prevention (DLP) checks on outgoing data can stop sensitive information such as social security numbers, credit card numbers and medical information from the network. It can do this by scanning and matching outgoing data to a database of known patterns that may be sensitive or confidential. It can also detect phishing attacks by inspecting and blocking outgoing web traffic. This enables the organization to reduce data leakage and other risks from malicious outsiders or unwitting internal users.
Threat Detection
With more and more organizations adopting remote workplace settings, it is imperative to safeguard your data against external threats. Even if an employee’s intentions are good, their negligence can lead to costly cyberattacks that can damage the company’s reputation and compromise confidential information. To prevent such incidents, a secure web gateway (SWG) is a proxy between the organization’s internal staff and the internet. It is generally available as hardware, software or a virtual appliance and can be installed along the network perimeter or in the cloud. It monitors all web traffic, both inbound from endpoints and outbound to the web.
Its threat detection capabilities are essential in thwarting cybercriminals’ attempts to exploit seemingly harmless websites by injecting them with malware and then duping unsuspecting employees into clicking on them. SWGs can also detect suspicious files or documents that could be uploaded or downloaded by comparing their code against known malware. In addition, an SWG solution can decrypt SSL-encrypted traffic and scan the content of HTTPS web pages to identify and block malware, viruses, spyware and other malicious threats.
Content Filtering
As the name suggests, a secure Web gateway is a tool that filters unwanted software/malware from user-initiated Web/Internet traffic. This helps protect PCs from infection and enforces corporate and regulatory policy compliance. A good SWG solution must, at a minimum, include URL filtering, malicious-code detection and filtering, and application controls for popular Web-based applications, such as instant messaging (IM) and Skype. More recently, native or integrated data leak prevention is also increasingly included.
Content filtering works by examining the contents of incoming and outgoing network traffic and denying access to sites that violate established security policies. In addition, it can prevent outbound data exfiltration by inspecting data for specific patterns and phrases that match sensitive data (such as social security numbers, credit card information, medical records and intellectual property) and blocking the data before it leaves the organization’s networks and systems.
SWGs can also protect against P2P malware by scanning network traffic for malicious code and executing potentially dangerous code in a controlled environment to see if it behaves like known malware, thus helping to keep harmful payloads from infecting the organization’s PCs. This is a critical capability as more and more companies embrace remote task forces that require employees to work from home or on public networks that are less secure than the company’s internal infrastructure.
User Authentication
A secure gateway solution can help prevent malware from entering or leaving the network by requiring user authentication before it allows access. This helps prevent cyberattacks by ensuring that only authorized users access the web or applications and prevents data exfiltration – when data leaves the company network to external locations.
SWGs typically check incoming web traffic against a list of allowed or blocked sites and security policies, including URL categories. This helps determine if an application is safe or dangerous and can block unauthorized ones altogether. Using sandboxing, they can also test code for malware in an isolated environment to see how it behaves before it’s allowed into the network.
In addition, SWGs can control application use based on a user’s identity or location, and some offer zero trust network access (ZTNA) that provides secure remote access to the company’s systems even when employees are outside of the office. They can also support integration with zero-day anti-malware solutions and security monitoring. This helps ensure a fully integrated security architecture for optimal protection against today’s most advanced threats.
Cloud-Based
As organizations rely on remote workforces and cloud-based services, it’s more important than ever to protect data against cyber threats. A secure web gateway (SWG) protects data that travels outside your network.
A SWG can be installed as a hardware appliance or run as software in the cloud. When a SWG is run in the cloud, it operates as a proxy between users and the internet. This gives it greater access and speed compared to an on-premises appliance.
The SWG will inspect incoming and outgoing data, ensuring it matches your security policies. It also uses sandboxing, which tests malware in a controlled environment to see how it behaves. This enables a SWG to block malicious code before it can reach your network or systems and cause damage. The SWG can also prevent data exfiltration, blocking outbound data from leaving your network and preventing information leaks. Many SWGs natively provide data loss prevention (DLP) functionality or via integration with an existing DLP solution. The DLP feature can detect patterns and words that match social security numbers, credit card data, medical records, confidential files and intellectual property to prevent these data types from leaving the company.