Why Proxies Are Key to Automation and the Digital Economy

Data gathering and data merchants – everyone’s doing it

Even though most people find out about data gathering through Facebook scandals and other privacy crises, it’s not always private data that digital businesses are after. As more governments adopt the open data policy, there is more than enough valuable data to go around.

As it stands now, countless businesses were founded after their owners analyzed public data. It is obvious that publicly available data are enough to find a niche that no one is catering to. For instance, you could start a brick-and-mortar coffee shop if you analyzed data on coffee shop locations in Google Maps and found a nice spot where there were no other coffee shops around.

Some data gatherers make an exclusive business from the data they collect. Various marketing tools are a good example – they gather, aggregate and provide data to other companies. Their search engine optimization (SEO) tools are well-known for their huge data aggregation capabilities. Nevertheless, gathering all that data is difficult.

The unexpected bottleneck for the digital economy

Both API calls and data gathering connections use the internet to connect to another server and retrieve data. Unfortunately, as the number of these connections scales, the servers implement a vital bottleneck, which has kept the online world from collapsing for decades.

Connection limiting – or IP address blocks – are the basic server protection functions, which administrators use to protect their websites. Any given server has its limitations, and if you try to connect to it a million times per second, it is going to overload and crash.

Some solutions do not solve the problem

All major digital businesses that need to avoid DoS attack protections have to use some work-around. In essence, all of these workarounds just change the IP address of their devices. Since the IP address is a major factor for identifying anyone online, you can scale the number of connection requests you send with the number of IP addresses you use.

Sadly, it’s not enough to buy a new computer for your work network and use it for a data gathering script, if you are doing it at scale. Every computer on the same network will share a subnetwork, which will be visible in its IP address. Servers also limit connections from the same subnets, because that is what attackers use for the next level DoS attacks – Distributed denial-of-service attacks (or DDoS attacks).

So what is the solution which countless flight ticket companies, SEO tools, ad verification companies and other businesses use?

As the digital economy expands, so do the ways in which proxy networks help various businesses.

• All major e-commerce platforms, including Amazon, are gathering data on competitor platforms to provide the most appealing prices, product presentations and inventories.
• Digital marketing agencies are using proxy networks to manage thousands of social media accounts for their clients on a daily basis.
• The whole SEO industry is dependent on proxies to gather search engine result data and provide ranking tracking services or aggregated search query suggestions.
• International businesses use proxies in other countries to get the freshest, most precise and the highest quality information.

Just think about how your world would look like today if there were no real data aggregation tools, no way to see localized information for another country, no flight ticket search engines, no real market analyses, no way to find out what products are lacking in the market, etc. It would definitely be a bleaker world for us all, and one where the digital economy plays a minor role.

That’s why you should thank your local proxy provider for the work that they do in enabling and vitalizing our economy.