The traditional security perimeter is broken. When applications in an enterprise data center were the center of everything, it made sense to direct all enterprise traffic to the data center over a hub-and-spoke network. Even as more traffic was directed to the internet and threats became more complex, you could still protect your perimeter and users with stacks of gateway appliances.
However, applications and services have moved to the cloud for good through the use of SaaS and other models, and users have left the network to work from home, on the road—just about anywhere but the office.
This means their traffic goes straight to their cloud apps over the internet, bypassing the network perimeter and appliances altogether. As a result, the network where business takes place is now simply the internet. The move to cloud and work from anywhere is great for building an agile digital business, but it has broken the traditional network security model.
Despite massive appliance investments, many organizations still struggle to provide consistent cybersecurity, with all the latest breaches serving as evidence. Even when safely browsing trusted websites, users continue to fall victim to a host of internet-based threats.
With the rise of SSL-encrypted traffic, in which malware and other threats frequently hide, organizations need an integrated approach that inspects all traffic, including SSL. Capacity-limited hardware appliances often ignore “trusted” content from CDNs and let SSL traffic pass uninspected. Additionally, multiple service-chained appliances can’t share or correlate threat intelligence quickly enough to properly respond to developing threats. All these issues limit an organization’s visibility and ability to prevent attacks.
A cloud security gateway lets your security team see farther into the abyss that is network traffic, with functionality that inspects TLS/SSL-encrypted traffic. This improves data protection and data security as your organization leverages the new corporate network—the internet.