How Proxies Can Up Your Competitive Advantage

As the world has become a global village and we now operate a borderless market, both your online and offline businesses are in for the stiff competition and the only way to up your competitive advantage is to seek out innovative ways to stay relevant. With proxies as a third-party server, however, you can effectively ward off a lot of the challenges that can run down your business.

A proxy server also referred to as proxy or application-level gateway is a computer that works by intercepting connections between sender and receiver. With a proxy in place, all your organization’s data will be fed in through one port and are forwarded to the rest of the network via another port.

With the advancement in technology affording businesses the necessary tech-savviness to upgrade their performances, products, services, and quality, you must not be caught on the sidelines.

So, what roles can proxies play in upping your competitive advantage?

 1. Insurance against attacks

One thing that will readily bring your business crumpling is a cyberattack. The effects can be so devastating that you must go all the way to ensure that you are protected.

To show how dreadful cyberattacks can be, a Gallup study, reports that Americans are more worried about cybercrime as compared to serious violent crimes (including terrorism, being murdered, and being sexually assaulted).

The study also shows that the two cybercrimes that top the list of their worries are identity theft and hacking:

• 71 percent of Americans are worried about having their personal or financial information hacked.
• 67 percent of Americans are worried about being a victim of identity theft.

In comparison:

• 24 percent are worried about being a victim of terrorism.
• 22 percent are worried about being attacked while driving, 20 percent about being sexually assaulted, and 17 percent about being murdered.
• 7 percent are worried about being assaulted at the workplace.

A study reported by Cybint, says that almost 60% of companies have experienced cyber attacks such as DDoS attacks, phishing, and social engineering attacks. This becomes more frightening if you consider that in January 2019 alone, exactly 1,769, 185,063 user records were leaked. 

You need to understand that Ransomware attacks aren’t receding. They will reportedly cost organizations an estimated $11.5 billion in 2019 alone. 

Right from individual computer users to governments, nobody is spared. In fact, just recently, the local government of Jackson County, Georgia, had to pay $400,000 in ransom due to a ransomware attack and North Carolina’s Orange County experienced its third ransomware attack in six years.

Is there any way you have left your organization in a delicate situation as regards threats? If you are not making efforts to put in place a control measure then you are shooting yourself at the foot.

With proxies, you can block direct access between two networks, thereby making it much more difficult for hackers to get internal addresses and details of a private network. By hiding the source of your IP address to external systems, additional protection is provided from the prying eyes of hackers intent on extracting information from your internal systems. 

The use of logging and authentication features serve to identify and authorize external services attempting to enter your internal network. Any unwanted visitor can be recognized and checkmated.

2. Improve network performance

Proxies are also used to cache web pages. Once an internal user requests a URL from outside, a temporary copy is stored locally. 

Any other time an internal user requests the same URL, the proxy does not need to go and retrieve the original across the network. Precious bandwidth on a busy network is freed and your employees are able to browse the internet faster increasing your overall performance.

The catch here, however, is that everything has its benefits and flaws. And the same applies to proxies. Whenever you want to buy proxies, GeoSurf an operator in the market advises that you must take into consideration what you actually want to achieve. 

The point here is to find a solution with pros that outweigh the cons and at a price which suits you the most. Even though a premium proxy will initially cost you more, it will certainly give you peace of mind that cheap proxies can’t.

3. Check employees internet usage

You wouldn’t want your employees to access insecure or inappropriate websites on company networks and this is why you need proxies. With a proxy in place, you can control which devices have access to the network and which sites those devices can visit. 

You are also able to block any offensive content, as well as sites you don’t want employees using on company time. Proxies can be used to record what content is being accessed and at what time. 

Your security team will be able to monitor for potential illegal activity or security breaches.

4. Balancing traffic to avoid server crashing 

None of your customers will be happy with your organization if your site keeps on crashing. Peering, cloud data storage, and proxies work together to avoid this happening. 

Rightly, your content and data are stored in the cloud and across multiple servers globally. With peering, you are able to handle more traffic. 

What a proxy does in this kind of situation is to balance customers’ requests to each and every server, ensuring that there is no overload. All of these are carried out in the background to enhance smooth customer experience. 

5. Execute sensitive tasks anonymously

Proxies are very good for keeping your web presence anonymous. Whistleblowers, security officers, and reporters rely on this all-important security measure to protect themselves, their companies, partners, clients, and even sources. 

If you are into any innovation you want to keep away from prying eyes, you can count on proxies to get it done. Any sensitive business tasks done online will be more secure if they are anonymized via proxies.