Secure Web Gateway (SWG)

SWG is a vital development in cybersecurity that protects organizations from online threats, enforces security rules, and helps you stay compliant with regulations. SWG acts as a wall between the Internet and your network, checking and controlling traffic to ensure safety and compliance. Work-from-anywhere and rapid SaaS adoption have proven the need for cloud native security solutions. Sitting between users, the web, and SaaS apps, SWG can terminate every connection inline, inspect all web traffic, and apply user-centric security and access policies to decrease your attack surface, prevent compromise, stop lateral movement, and halt sensitive data loss.

SECs can form a crucial part of your web security system. Sitting between users and the web, they can provide advanced protection by inspecting requests and ensuring they are in line with your security policies. Anything that’s deemed risky will be filtered out and blocked. The growing adoption of cloud-based applications — combined with a more mobile, distributed workforce — have added stress to enterprise cybersecurity. As the challenges have increased for administrators to maintain visibility and control over data, and apply unified security policies, SWG has gained prominence for its capability of analyzing data in real time without slowing its flow along the network.

The primary consideration for any organization should be to understand how cyberthreats are evolving alongside technology developments, and the impact that a cyberattack or denial of service breach would have on your business, its reputation, and your future growth. Our Cybersecurity is exceptionally well positioned to help you understand the implications of a cyberattack and how implementing a SWG could help you avoid disaster. Among your considerations should be: your existing security infrastructure, and how well it has kept pace with changing threats; your specific data traffic patterns and how employees, contractors, and others use your network; and a realistic cost breakdown that weighs both the expense of implementing an SWG against how much a data breach might cost your business and reputation.

In basic terms, a proxy is a networking function, while an SWG is a security solution. Typically, a proxy is a dedicated computer, or app, that is positioned between a remote user and an online destination, such as a website, server, or cloud-based app. An SWG is also positioned between the user and his/her intended target, but its functionality is much broader and more targeted — monitoring in real time for web-based threats such as malware, phishing attempts, and other malicious activities, and using tactics that can include URL filtering, virus/malware scanning, SSL inspection, and content filtering.

SWGs are especially well suited to identifying hidden threats that may enter your network through remote users accessing SaaS applications in the cloud, introducing malware into your network inadvertently, or through other means. By filtering and inspecting user traffic on your network, an SWG can rapidly root out anything suspicious, such as zero-day malware.