What Is a Cloud Security Gateway?

Why Shift to a Cloud Security Gateway?

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.

What Are the Benefits of a Cloud Security Gateway?

A cloud security gateway delivers the complete security stack as a service, with in-depth protection against malware, advanced threats, phishing, browser exploits, malicious URLs, botnets, and more. A cloud native security gateway is a shift from traditional appliance models and offers a range of benefits:

Modernized Security

• Provides secure direct-to-cloud connections for all offices and users, eliminating appliances and reducing reliance on costly WAN infrastructure
• Delivers the entire outbound gateway security stack as a service from the cloud, with always-on security whenever and wherever users connect
• Elastically scales your capacity requirements as traffic demands increase—no more hardware capacity limitations
• Integrates services in a single platform, including secure web gateway, URL filtering, next-gen firewall, intrusion prevention, antivirus, data loss prevention (DLP), sandbox, cloud access security broker (CASB), and more

Faster User Experience

• Enables every user to connect directly to the internet with all security enforced in the cloud—no backhauling across hub-and-spoke architectures for inspection
• Distributes all services cloud-wide to provide fast, local connections for users everywhere
• Easily scales to handle the bandwidth demands of cloud applications and latency-sensitive apps, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom

Unified Policies and Reporting

• Policies follow users wherever they connect so they get consistent security and access controls from day one 
• Uses one console to enforce a unified user or group policy across the entire security stack
• Provides real-time reporting and centralized analytics that improve threat context and visibility across all users