Protecting Your Brand with a Proxy Network
Cybersecurity is a prominent concern for any business. The range and sophistication of threats facing the modern business is growing by day. Unless appropriate steps are taken to put defenses in place against future attacks, and to respond to current threats as they are detected, businesses will remain vulnerable to external intrusions.
There are many ways of protecting a business’s network. With the threats facing corporate networks continuing to multiply, stronger and stronger defenses have been needed to ensure these networks remain secure. But while these defenses have had to become more sophisticated, in order to head off the increasingly sophisticated threats that they are defending against, there must still be an emphasis on usability.
Not every business is in a position to invest in an on-site cybersecurity team. In fact, a growing number of businesses are choosing to outsource all of their cybersecurity needs instead. This saves money and provides them with access to hardware, software, and knowledge that they would otherwise struggle to afford. Whatever approach a business takes to their cybersecurity, they need to strike a balance between choosing powerful and capable defenses and implementing a security system that is either passive in its operation, or which can easily be understood by those who need to use it.
For example, a tool commonly employed by businesses as a way of keeping sensitive data secure, and away from prying eyes, is a VPN. Businesses who allow employees access their networks remotely will often require them to do so through a VPN. This will ensure that any data they exchange with the network is sent through an encrypted communications channel. This prevents attackers from intercepting and reading the data.
A proxy network is one of the many tools available to businesses who are looking to enhance the security of their corporate networks. Placing a proxy server between a corporate network and the wider internet will confer many of the same advantages as a VPN, but it also brings some other added benefits to the table. Let us also add that different tasks need different anonymity level. For higher anonymity, residential proxies can work wonders here, as it masks your IP completely. We’ll go a little bit more into detail on residential proxies later on in this text.
With a Proxy Network You Won’t be Fooled Ever Again and Will Know Everything About Your Product
Adding a proxy server to your business network will introduce an extra layer of security, as well as giving you the ability to control the flow of traffic in and out of your network in a much more precise and granular way. There are plenty of compelling reasons to add a proxy servers to your business network:
- Improve your corporate security: Every business today is concerned about the potential for cyber attacks Not only are cyber attacks a massive inconvenience, they are also becoming costlier as time goes on. Whether businesses face liability for breaches that expose customers’ personal data, or they suffer damage to their reputation as a result of the breach, there are a number of ways in which security breaches can be financially damaging.
A proxy server reduces the chances of such a brief occurring in the first place, adding an extra layer of security between your network and the internet. Your proxy server can then be used as a means of monitoring and filtering incoming and outgoing traffic. Even if an attacker is able to access your proxy server, this will not give them access to the servers that actually store sensitive company data.
- Improve Anonymity: Proxies are best known amongst most people for their ability to enhance the privacy of internet users. When connecting to the internet through a proxy server, the user’s personal IP address will be concealed, making them much more difficult to trace. This is especially with residential proxies, as residential proxies are assigned to a homeowner by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). This means that the proxy will be legitimate and mask your business’ IP address without the chance of looking as fake.
However, relatively few people appreciate how important this anonymity can be for businesses as well as individuals. Corporate espionage is a very real and growing threat. It isn’t just miscreant hackers looking to cause trouble and score themselves some infamy that businesses have to worry about these days. There are now numerous actors, including foreign corporations and even nation states, who might try and access your business’s most sensitive secrets. Any would-be spy who attempts to trace web traffic in an effort to work out what your business is developing will find this a fruitless task if your business uses a proxy network.
- Balance traffic: Nothing is more frustrating for your users and customers than when your website goes down and is inaccessible for prolonged periods. Most of the time when this occurs, it is a preventable situation. Either poor network maintenance, or the work of attackers taking advantage of weak security, can cause your servers to crash and your website to go down. Both of these situations are preventable, and a proxy server can help with both.
With a proxy server, you can create a single web address that will serve as the access point to your website for your users. You can then store the actual content and data of your website across a range of servers, located across the globe.Your proxy server can make sure that the distribution of requests to the various servers is even-handed and none of them overload as a result.
- Control employee internet usage: If you want your corporate network to remain free of external threats, you will also need to monitor how it is used internally. Employees being careless in their internet usage can end up undermining the security of your entire network and potentially lead to some serious problems. For this reason, many businesses choose to run their internal networks on a proxy server.
When access to the network is granted through a proxy network, networking administrators can monitor and control the traffic that flows through it. This means that it is just as easy to prevent an employee inside the network from accessing an insecure website outside of it as it is to prevent an unauthorized connection from the outside.
- Save bandwidth: In addition to the security and productivity benefits that a proxy server can bring, it can also lead to much faster and more efficient internet usage. By using a proxy server to compress internet traffic, cache regularly accessed files and web pages, and strip away ads from websites, you can reduce your bandwidth usage quite considerably. This leaves more bandwidth available for your workers to use and ensures they always have fast internet access.
Also, a good way to save bandwidth would be by using residential proxies. How? Well, let’s say you are implementing ad verification, or testing your page availability in different places around the world, you will need a faster proxy. A residential proxy is exactly that and you won’t overload your network.
The Importance of a Brand Protection
Brands are amongst the most important assets that any businesses have. Keeping your brands safe and protecting their reputation is essential for the overall health of your business. If you are able to maintain a strong brand, it can dramatically increase the value of your business. You will have a much easier time attracting investors and customers if you have a strong brand to put forward.
Your brands also serve as a shorthand for your companies values and ethos. This further adds to their importance and underscores the importance of safeguarding them. When your brand takes a hit, your business also takes a hit. The damage to a brand can easily spread to its creator, as well as the parent business.
Just as your customers will come to view your brand as a defining aspect of your business, so too will your employees. A strong brand will attract talent much more easily. It will also make existing staff more likely to develop a sense of loyalty towards your business. Clearly, brands are important to a business. And, as a result, so is the protection of those brands. Protecting a brand is mostly, but not entirely, about preventing theft. Whether a competitor might seek to steal an entire brand, or a single idea that you have invested into that brand, if you don’t take active measures to ensure your brand is protected, they will be successful.
Theft of ideas in business is nothing new, it is actually quite common. If you are a new business looking to establish yourself, branding will be an important part of this. If you don’t defend your brand from the very beginning, there is a good chance that another startup in the same field of you will look to poach the idea and claim it as their own. If your business is already well established, there will undoubtedly be numerous entrepreneurs who are just waiting for their opportunity to steal a slice of your pie.
Corporate espionage and brand theft are things that also can end up costing a business dearly. Not only will you potentially have to spend money dealing with litigation and protecting your brand, but if someone manages to access sensitive information about your brand before you have launched it, they could undercut you in a serious way. In a worst-case scenario, failing to protect your brand could end with you having to go back to the drawing board and starting again from scratch.
Adding a proxy server that offers residential proxies to your network allows you to keep your brand better protected. As we mentioned earlier, a would-be data thief who is trying to trace internet traffic back to your corporate network will have a much more difficult, if not impossible, task ahead of them. Similarly, the ability to monitor and filter traffic flowing in and out of your network reduces the number of weak points created by careless usage of your corporate internet, and also allows you to detect and prevent suspicious incoming connections.
Why Choose Proxy Over a VPN
A virtual private network (VPN), such as NordVPN or Surfshark, provides a secure encrypted communications tunnel between a device and a server. Businesses frequently make use of VPNs to allow their remote-working employees to communicate securely with the corporate server. Because these communications are encrypted, an attacker won’t be able to intercept them. With more remote workers completing their work from the comfort of a coffee shop, taking advantage of the free public Wi-Fi, it’s hardly surprising that businesses have become increasingly worried about the potential security implications.
While VPNs are definitely useful, perhaps even essential, tools for any business, there are some advantages to using a proxy server that a VPN cannot offer. For example, other than a small number of very limited circumstances, a VPN will not improve the speed of your internet connection. On the other hand, a proxy server can considerably improve the speed of your corporate network, and even reduce the amount of bandwidth required to browse the internet.
A residential proxy network can still keep your data encrypted and secure in a similar way to a VPN, something that is vitally important in any modern business. A would-be hacker or thief looking to access or intercept sensitive company data can use a variety of techniques to trace internet traffic back to your corporate servers; a proxy will effectively thwart this.
So why a proxy can work better than a VPN? Well, there is one good reason. And that is if you are working in one location, and you need to get information from another location whilst remaining anonymous, you will need a proxy. And not any proxy – a residential proxy. A residential proxy can create multiple connections in different locations, and that is what a VPN cannot do.
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Become Anonymous Online with Proxies
Browsing the internet via a proxy server enables you to remain highly anonymous online. The anonymity is guaranteed as the proxies provided are residential. Meaning that the IP addresses are legitimate as if they are provided by an internet service provider to a homeowner. Part of the security benefits that a proxy offers to businesses as anonymous web browsing means that your employees IP addresses cannot be traced. If an attacker managed to trace a connection that they know originates from your network back to the source, they would learn the IP address of a computer on your network. This will give them a target to attack and an entry point into your network.
On the other hand, if you are connecting to the internet through a proxy server, it is this server that will retrieve websites and interface with the internet for you. This means that any connections that are traced back to source will lead back to the proxy server, not to individual machines on your network.
By keeping your traffic anonymous, and providing you with a much greater degree of control over your network, a proxy server can form a valuable addition to your brand protection strategy. The average business is constantly sending and receiving data, much of it relating to sensitive projects and concepts. Keeping this information secure is necessary to keep brands protected and promote an overall healthy business.
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About the author
James Keenan
Senior content writer
The automation and anonymity evangelist at Smartproxy. He believes in data freedom and everyone’s right to become a self-starter. James is here to share knowledge and help you succeed with residential proxies.
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