Notice on purchasing secure Web gateway: Four deployment options of SWG

Notice on purchasing secure Web gateway: Four deployment options of SWG
After determining the secure Web gateway that meets your security requirements and knowing which SWG functions you want to use and deploy, there is another question before purchasing products: how to deploy these tools? The answer to this question is crucial to the enterprise's final purchase decisions.

Fortunately, we have several different deployment options for SWG. Each deployment option provides customers with advantages in terms of speed, ease of use, deployment flexibility, and other specific requirements.

Next let's take a look at the main advantages and disadvantages of the four available SWG deployment options, and then discuss how to make the final purchase decisions.

Deployment Options of secure Web gateway

1. device:A device is the most common deployment method for SWG. They are fast, cost-effective, and completely independent. You can deploy the device to your rack, start it, and then you can start the operation. You can avoid the impact of software and hardware platforms. Some device settings also provide dedicated hardware to accelerate some computing-consuming features so that they can go beyond all competing deployment options. However, there is a drawback that as SWG devices become older, they often cannot meet the performance requirements of customers and they will need to be replaced rather than upgraded. In addition, scalability means buying more equipment; Disaster Recovery and Failover means buying more chassis. As enterprises gradually move to an internal cloud computing and virtual server environment, SWG's hardware model cannot be integrated with these data center architectures.

2. Software:A few vendors still provide SWG software. This mode provides flexibility and scalability options that cannot be provided by hardware deployment. Do you need more processing capabilities? You only need to allocate or deploy more resources. Although the software requires more time to install and configure, it provides more flexible deployment, integration, and resource allocation (such as memory, processor, and disk ). In addition, software licenses are easier to adjust based on the customer's specific needs, reducing the overall cost for most customers.

3. Virtual device:The most rapidly growing SWG deployment option is virtual equipment, because many companies want to use the virtualization platform to reduce costs and management troubles. As the name suggests, a virtual device is a software image of a hardware device. In many ways, Virtual Devices provide both hardware and software advantages: they can be scaled like software, but with hardware pre-configured deployment. The disadvantage is that virtual devices do not provide dedicated hardware acceleration. Therefore, the performance between virtual devices and real devices may vary greatly. At the same time, virtual devices are no longer pre-encapsulated, which requires customers to monitor resource utilization and adjust them regularly to ensure they provide good performance.

4. cloud-based or hybrid deployment:Some vendors have begun to launch cloud computing-based service products to supplement or replace internal deployment technologies. When anti-spam or strict Content Analysis overload internal hardware, enterprises usually transfer some work to cloud computing service providers to relieve the burden on internal platforms. Similarly, some customers want third-party cloud computing services only because they lack internal staff to manage products. Cloud-based SWG provides elastic on-demand Web filtering without changing existing IT systems. In this mode, network services are routed through cloud service providers before being sent to users. Users can choose to enable feature subsets (probably because their current system cannot provide URL filtering) and use the service as a pay-as-you-go.

Final Purchase: Deployment Options

Note that each deployment option uses a different billing mode. For example, the hardware sales method is based on the potential throughput level supported by the device and must be listed as Capex. Cloud services are charged on a monthly basis based on customer consumption, so they belong to Opex. Multiple models provide some flexibility for enterprises in how to use products and how to pay for products.

All suppliers are competing to provide a wide range of SWG functions for potential buyers. However, according to the evolutionary sequence that suppliers have always followed, the key is to remember that not every supplier will do everything well. Suppliers will have their specific core competencies and additional features-which are usually a rush to supplement or buy features, and often lack a certain degree of efficiency and effectiveness. For example, vendors may have a wealth of experience at the network layer, and their load balancing and packet inspection functions will provide incredible performance, but may not do well in content filtering and Email Security.

When purchasing SWG products, enterprises must consider these issues before making purchase decisions. Make sure that you choose a supplier that focuses on what you think is the most critical field, and make sure that the flexibility and pricing model provided by the supplier best meet your enterprise needs.