Today's cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated and widespread as organizations struggle to protect a growing mobile workforce that uses multiple devices, accesses sensitive data remotely, and uses third-party cloud services. Cyberattacks have been considered the fastest growing crime in the US, as is not surprising. Approximately USD 6 Trillion in damages will be caused by cybercrime this year, will continue to grow by 15 percent per year, and will reach USD 10.5 Trillion by 2025, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. An organization's reputation and intellectual property can be significantly damaged or even lost by a data breach, which not only costs money but also damages the bottom line. In the wake of the Colonial Pipeline hack,even the White House issued a historic cybersecurity directive requiring agencies to adopt better security practices.
Managing security for devices , applications, and users within an organization is becoming more complicated as cyberattacks continue to become more sophisticated and widespread. Despite the increasing complexity of today's network, traditional security solutions are often insufficient to protect devices, users, and applications in an agile manner since they cannot guard perimeter-less, dispersed networks. By utilizing cloud-based solutions-such as Google Workspace, Salesforce, Office365, Box, etc.-and accessing these solutions over the public internet, attackers have more points of compromise to begin their attacks.
Time Traveler's Memories
Secure Web Gateways (SWGs) have typically been provided as part of an on-premises security stack for years. SWGs became integral in ensuring both a secure and optimized internet browsing experience with the convergence of networking and security capabilities. As companies implement Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), SWG should be considered as a critical component to help protect users against web-based threats while maintaining consistency in security policies and adhering to government regulations.
A key weakness of on-premises SWGs is that they are not designed for a modern workforce and that they require specialized resources to deploy, configure, and manage. Traditionally, SWGs have a common characteristic of being anchored to physical locations and not having security policies that dynamically adjust their access policies to control the risk of access attempts. Additionally, because they cannot protect mobile devices and third-party cloud applications, traditional on-premises security solutions provide very little visibility, control, or actionable analytics in a "work- from-anywhere" world.
