Total Cloud Security Blog

Secure Web Gateways (SWGs), software for controlling access to websites and SaaS not managed by corporate IT, have evolved from hardware appliances installed on premises, to software running on end user devices with varying degrees of interaction with the security provider’s hosted infrastructure. But the details on how the software interacts with the security provider’s infrastructure makes all of the difference with respect to performance, security, and ease of management. The Bitglass SmartEdge SWG architecture uniquely addresses these concerns in several ways.

On June 8, 2021, Joseph Blount, President and Chief Executive Officer of Colonial Pipeline, appeared before the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs regarding the breach that injected ransomware into their servers and disrupted the company’s gasoline distribution network for over one week. In his testimony, Blount stated that the likely entry point of the breach was a “legacy virtual private network (VPN) profile that was not intended to be in use”. 

This type of breach points to the need for a unified approach for granular access to both cloud and on premises corporate data resources based on a number of criteria. The Bitglass Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution addresses this need.

Even as organizations continue adoption of cloud technologies, the need for secure access to on-premises resources has not gone away. In fact, as many companies navigate a return to the office while simultaneously supporting a portion of the workforce now permanently remote, secure access becomes even more important. 

We’ve established before that cloud access security brokers (CASBs) and secure web gateways (SWGs) do not compete and are, in fact, complementary security tools. However, in addition to this, there is overlap between the two which (along with other factors) is leading to their convergence.