Cloud Proxy | What It Is & How It Works

The Zscaler cloud proxy architecture provides reverse proxy coverage for all traffic, a core element of cloud access security broker (CASB) within the security service edge (SSE) model.

As part of an SSE framework, our cloud proxy architecture supports your organization in:

Securing Unmanaged Devices

Many of your employees may use multiple devices for work, including personal ones. Beyond that, plenty of suppliers, partners, and customers may need access to your internal applications on their own unmanaged devices, presenting a risk to your security.

You can install agents to manage devices your organization owns, but unmanaged endpoints are a different story. Third parties won’t let you install agents on their endpoints, and many employees don’t want agents on their personal devices, either. Instead, our proxy architecture offers agentless protection against data leakage and malware from any unmanaged device accessing your cloud applications and resources.

Data Protection

The Zscaler proxy architecture can enforce data loss prevention policies to prevent accidental or intentional uploads or downloads of sensitive information to or from sanctioned cloud apps. Because it operates inline and inspects all traffic, even encrypted traffic, it can ensure uploaded or downloaded data falls in line with your policies.

Threat Prevention

An infected file in a cloud service can spread to connected apps and devices—especially unmanaged devices. By agentlessly preventing uploads or downloads of infected files to or from cloud resources, our proxy architecture providesadvanced threat protection against malware and ransomware.

By nature, our architecture also hides servers and their IP addresses from clients, which protects your web resources from threats such as distributed denial of service (DDoS attacks).

Load Balancing

The Zscaler proxy can be used to handle client requests that could otherwise overwhelm a single server with high demand, promoting high availability and optimizing load times by distributing requests to your servers evenly.