As Gartner defined, Secure Web Gateways utilize URL filtering, advanced threat d

Question

As Gartner defined, Secure Web Gateways utilize URL filtering, advanced threat defense, legacy malware protection and application control technologies to defend users from Internet-borne threats, and to help enterprises enforce Internet policy compliance. SWGs are delivered as on-premises appliances (hardware and virtual) or cloud-based services. Vendors differ greatly in the maturity and features of their cloud-based services, and in their ability to protect enterprises from advanced threats.

Let's assume that I have a Firewall, IPS on my network and Web Application Firewall in front of my Web Applications, Server.

I know that Next Generation Firewall's now provide URL Filtering, Application Control, Antivirus and so on. WAF will secure the back end web server by monitoring every HTTP request and response to and from the server. So, I'm confused on,

What would be the protection that Secure Web Gateway only provides, other appliances don't?

Explanation / Answer

Most of the Next-Gen FW use their own Web reputation/AV. I'm sorry but there is still a huge gap between their Global Intelligence Network and a gartner market leader proxy like Blue Coat. Proxies also act has a second layer of defense and they can also be used in reverse proxy mode to protect servers. The level of granularity for policies in a real Proxy is 100000x times more than on a Next-Gen FW.

Proxies also do caching which improves performance. One other major advantage of Proxies is they terminate TCP. Next-Gen FW don't. In security this is a major difference, since Next-Gen FW can allow a flow without inspecting all of the content.

Each solution completes the other and provides another layer of protection.

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