What is a secure web gateway? What are the reasons why you need to have this within your company? Find out below.
What Is a Secure Web Gateway?
A secure web gateway or SWG refers to a network device that controls the flow of traffic in and out of your network. It is also referred to as a firewall. It is intended to protect your network from malicious traffic and hackers while allowing normal traffic to pass.
\Web gateway can also be referred to as a reverse proxy gateway or surrogate, but it all means the same thing. A web gateway is a proxy server that sits between the internal corporate networks and the Internet.
Gateways are designed to do two things:
- They protect your internal network from external threats;
- They protect your internal users from malicious or inappropriate resources on the Internet.
Gateways are usually positioned on your network perimeter and are usually dedicated devices, although they can be software applications as well. SWGs can protect your network through various forms of protocols. These include:
- Firewalls that allow or block traffic based on source, destination, and port number;
- Application firewalls which provide filtering based on application-specific content types such as all HTTP requests, NetBIOS requests, etc.;
- Reverse proxies which provide access control, load balancing, and caching;
- SSL inspection which decrypts SSL traffic for inspection by other security systems;
- Web caching systems for optimizing website delivery for local users;
- Intrusion prevention systems monitor network traffic for suspicious activities. And then takes action (drop, rate-limit, alert) to prevent exploits from succeeding;
- Network behavior analysis which monitors the movement of traffic across multiple hosts to detect anomalies (injection, buffer overflow, intrusion attempts)
What Are the Functions of a Secure Web Gateway?
The term “web gateway” can sometimes refer specifically to a reverse proxy gateway or surrogate. A reverse proxy gateway sits between the Internet and your servers (application servers).
Requests come in from the Internet via the reverse proxy, and responses go back out to the Internet via the reverse proxy. Hence, the term “reverse” proxy. The primary function of a reverse proxy gateway is to provide secure access to internal web services while keeping them invisible from outside users.
A surrogate is another term used for this type of web gateway. Surrogates are also used for content caching and load balancing. So, the main function of an SWG is to securely provide access to web-based applications and services from the Internet.
The functions of an SWG include:
- Allow or deny access to certain resources on the Internet-based on rules and policies;
- But also allow or deny access to certain resources on the Internet-based on user identity;
- Transform user identity to share information securely between different networks;
- Provide security services that are normally implemented in dedicated security devices such as firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, proxies, and so on.
Conclusion
There are many benefits of having an SWG within your enterprise. This is better than having multiple security policies being enforced by multiple firewalls and other network devices. So, use SWG today.