How green is your secure web gateway? How effective is your use of this tool today? And how can you make sure you are using this well?
What Is Secure Web Gateway?
A green or good secure web gateway (SWG) can help organizations protect their websites and data from advanced threats, attacks, and vulnerabilities.
As BYOD continues to expand, IT needs to look at how it can manage this trend while keeping the organization’s sensitive data safe. Web gateway tools can help. In a way, an SWG can be seen as the “gatekeeper” of any website.
The role of SWG is to protect an organization’s sensitive data and information assets. This includes customers, partners, vendors, and employees–from advanced threats, attacks, and vulnerabilities that can compromise their security. This can be done by implementing several security technologies that work together to block threats before they reach the internal network.
But how can you evaluate and know how green your SWG is?
How Green Is Your Secure Web Gateway?
Use this list as a guideline when evaluating your current use of SWG tools:
1. URL filtering. URL filtering is often considered the “first line of defense” when it comes to securing web gateways. It is used to block undesirable traffic from accessing sensitive sites or domains. Moreover, this is used at the gateway level to block access to known malicious websites and domains. As well as IP addresses associated with specific threats like botnets, spyware or malware networks. It can also be used to stop access to phishing sites or content containing mature content like pornography or hate speech. Use it in conjunction with other security solutions for best results.
2. Traffic inspection. Traffic inspection allows you to analyze all traffic that flows through your network perimeter for signs of compromise (SOC). This enables you to identify malicious websites hosting malicious code. Like viruses, phishing sites are designed to steal personal information. Or other malicious activity like spam emails coming from infected systems on the Internet. Moreover, traffic inspection also allows you to identify infected hosts on the network. And an unusual behavior by users accessing web pages on your network. As well as malware infections within the domain itself. In this way, it can help prevent attacks from spreading across your enterprise network.
3. Web application firewall (WAF). WAF is a tool used in conjunction with URL filtering or traffic inspection. This is to provide protection against malicious code that may have evaded detection by other solutions in place in your network perimeter. A WAF can also help protect against SQL injection attacks against databases on your network.. As well as cross-site scripting, which can allow hackers to steal user credentials.
Final Words
As you can see, an SWG is a powerful tool that can help improve the business’ security posture. However, using it effectively can be a challenge. So, in this way, you need to make sure you are doing it correctly. Otherwise, you may not be getting the full value out of it.