As an organization, you’re entrusted with a lot of data that you must keep safe. The information might be about your clients, the work of your company, or sensitive data about your employees.
With data breaches on the rise, it’s getting more and more difficult to protect organizations from data breaches and data leaks. Hackers are getting savvier and have been discovering new ways to breach companies every year.
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What’s more, due to remote work, more companies use cloud technology and online networks that are easier to access remotely. This is understandable, since there are many benefits of the cloud. However, if not protected, they can pose a major flaw in cybersecurity.
In the past year, almost 45% of the companies in the U.S. have experienced a data breach. We expect this number to get even higher in the coming months.
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Since everyone is tired of hearing about breaches and data leaks, all your employees and clients want to know is if their data is safe and whether they should share it with your company.
To protect their data and monitor the information that is coming into and going out of their systems, companies have been using Secure Web Gateway.
What is a Secure Web Gateway, how can it prevent data loss, and how does it ensure that the data you have is used according to compliance policies?
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Read on to find out.
What is a Secure Web Gateway?
Secure Web Gateway (SWG) is multilayered protection that enforces various company policies and keeps your systems and network safe from possible cyber-attacks and malware.
SWG works similarly to a firewall that monitors traffic between the user and the internet. The key difference is in the tool’s complexity because it has more features.
The application of Secure Web Gateway is versatile. You can use it to filter specific URLs, control the use of applications, prevent data loss, work as an antivirus, or inspect HTTPS.
For example, to determine whether the traffic is unwanted, it considers company policies that govern whether a certain website should be accessible for your employees on company devices or not.
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For every company, setting what SWG will do exactly depends on what you need, what is likely to be high risk in your company, and your company’s exact regulations.
Some organizations use SWG in-house and others on their cloud — depending on what kind of systems you use to operate your company.
How to Prevent Data Loss with Secure Web Gateway?
Data can be leaked intentionally or unintentionally, causing you to lose vulnerable information about your customers, employees, and clients.
Secure Web Gateway includes data loss prevention, a feature that makes sure any sensitive information about you, your clients, and your employees aren’t leaked outside of your network.
To make sure that data isn’t accessible outside of the network, the data loss prevention feature of the Secure Web Gateway monitors all the data that is circulating in your system. It also cross-checks its use with the compliance policy of your company.
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The data loss prevention feature can monitor information that is being shared via email, during web browsing, or data that is shared over various files.
Alerts on whether your information is handled properly are sent to your end-users and they can help your IT team save time and take care of a possible data loss before it even happens.
Safer Surfing for Your Employees with Secure Web Gateway
Training your less tech-savvy employees that covers the basics of cybersecurity might not be enough. They might learn to recognize websites that are high-risk, but not know how to put training into practice.
What’s more, you can’t control whether they’ll use work devices for private purposes or accidentally access websites that contain malware. While working, they might open a link in a phishing email or click on a website that seems safe, but really isn’t.
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One blunder is all it takes, and when it comes to human error, mistakes are unfortunately inevitable.
That’s why it’s important to have tools that block certain traffic to prevent your team from accessing malicious sites.
Secure Web Gateway can:
- Block access to applications and websites that are marked as potentially malicious
- Ensures that all the company’s regulations, protocols, and policies are enforced for a person using your devices
- Detect if your device already is infected with malware as the virus might find its way to your devices via external disks
- Provide cybersecurity protection for remote employees that have to connect to your network from their home devices
Websites that are infected with malware can download viruses to work devices. If the malware isn’t removed from your system, it might collect data or monitor the activity of your employees.
Changing data compliance policies are getting complex to follow and enforce on your systems — especially if the traffic on your network is from different parts of the world.
The shift to remote work has caused a lot of cybersecurity concerns and data loss. Employees connect to your network from their less than secure home devices containing vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit to obtain data.
Complex Networks Require Layered Data Security
As your company grows, it’s getting more and more challenging to track how data in the company is being used and whether all the data compliance policies are being enforced.
Also, you get more information every day — a lot of it is sensitive and confidential and thus can damage your reputation if it gets out.
To keep the trust that you’ve built with your customers, clients, and employees, you need a layered cybersecurity system.
For monitoring traffic and data that is in their systems, scalable companies with remote workers have been using Secure Web Gateway.
They rely on SWG to prevent data loss in their company, enforce compliance policies, limit the use of high-risk web applications, mitigate malware on devices, and inspect traffic that is passing through the gateway.