Just like technology, cybersecurity is growing in complexity and sophistication with every passing day. To add to this, the dynamics of the digital workspace have also completely changed in the past couple of years. People are working remotely, using a large variety of devices, accessing sensitive information, and making use of a lot of third-party services.
In line with these changes, cybercriminals are also modifying their strategies and targeting the weak points in the latest systems. Digital crime has also grown by many folds in the past few years and according to market research, the value of global damage from digital crime is going to reach $6 trillion in 2021.
By 2025 this figure is expected to climb to well over $10 trillion. While the monetary damage of a digital attack is one thing, the hit that the reputation of a company takes is often more costly than the money that they lose.
All of this means that the job of security professionals and IT security managers in a business is more challenging than ever before. They are often caught up with systems and tools that no longer address the latest security needs and are inefficiently protecting an organization that has no defined boundary. With so much of the company's infrastructure being virtual, there are more digital assets to protect than ever before. Particularly when it comes to cloud-based solutions such as Google Workspace, making sure everything is secure is quite challenging.
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) are something that has been around for quite a while and is a common part of on-premises security. Whether you are looking for digital security or more optimized networking and online performance, SWG's can help out.
More importantly, if you are looking to implement Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) then SWGs are going to be an important stepping stone for this task. However there are several limitations with traditional SWGs, they aren’t the best solution for mobile devices, they are tough to configure, deploy and manage, they are more suited to physical offices, and are often limited to a single security policy.
To overcome these limitations modern SWG solutions rely on cloud services. By being cloud-native these tried and tested security solutions can now be delivered to users through the web regardless of where they are. Moreover, as they are no longer tied to legacy appliances, their capabilities are far more flexible than before. With these systems you can:
To keep the environment safe, a security solution should be able to decrypt, inspect, and then re-package traffic and move it along. While doing this these solutions can leverage a large variety of techniques to do this as efficiently as possible. More importantly, SWGs need to be able to do this in one go. They need to open a data pocket only once to perform all the security checks that they need to.
Every time a package is opened there is an increase in the security risk and it also compromises the network latency. Through a single-pass process, SWGs can ensure that they preserve data integrity, security hygiene and also optimize connectivity. The latest SWGs can conduct a range of security checks when a user forwards a request including things such as deep packet inspection, SSL/TSL encryption, malware prevention, user authentication, and many more.
Ideally, these solutions should be paired with other SASE systems to create a cohesive security framework that will protect all kinds of devices from all kinds of threats regardless of their physical location while also ensuring that everything happening on and in the network complies with the security policy and legal regulations.