What Is a Cloud Security Gateway?

Cloud Security Gateway is cloud-based solutions designed to provide comprehensive protection for corporate web traffic, whether inbound or outbound, securing connections to the web, SaaS and private applications. Building on the foundation of secure web gateways (SWGs), a cloud security gateway incorporates additional security features to offer all-in-one protection and security policy enforcement for companies looking to leverage cloud efficiencies, such as always-on management, centralized policy administration and scalable, globally available security services.

Cloud Security Gateway offers an alternative to premises-based security gateways for companies seeking cost-effective security management or global security services that can support geographically distributed operations, such as global offices and sites, or a hybrid or remote workforce.

Learn More The Rise of Hybrid Secure Web Gateway

How Does Cloud Security Gateway Work

Cloud Security Gateway is a Internet Access solution that sits between a user and all target resources, whether internal or external to the company. The cloud security gateway inspects traffic en route to its destination, ensuring security and enforcing corporate security policies.

Cloud Security Gateway differ from similar solutions — such as an SWG — because they integrate a greater range of security functions within a single solution. A cloud security gateway is an all-in-one solution that delivers a complete security stack from the cloud for managing access control, data protection and threat prevention across connections heading to the internet, SaaS and private applications.

Why Shift to Cloud Security Gateway?

In the past, the majority of an organization’s IT assets, applications and users were located on the corporate network. When this was true, enterprise security solutions deployed in the corporate data center could efficiently and effectively monitor and secure corporate web traffic.

The rise of cloud infrastructure, Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, remote work and geographically-distributed operations has created a need for distributed security services, as well. Traditional on-prem security solutions require backhauling all corporate traffic to the datacenter or headquarters for security inspection, causing poor performance and latency. Moving to a cloud security gateway ensures that an organization is able to protect its employees and enforce security policies without harming network performance and employee productivity.

Benefits of a Cloud Security Gateway

Cloud Security Gateway provides a complete integrated, cloud-based security stack, protecting an organization’s employees, branch offices and third party users (such as partners and consultants). This brings multiple benefits to the organization, including the following:

Simplified Security: SASE Internet Access integrate multiple security functions into a single, cloud-based solution, including application control, data protection and threat prevention. This makes it easier to configure and manage the corporate security infrastructure.
Greater Scalability: A cloud-based security solution has the advantage of cloud elasticity. Security capabilities can scale rapidly if needed, ensuring that security meets the need of the organization.
Improved Network Performance: Cloud-based security eliminates the need to backhaul remote users’ traffic to the web, SaaS and IaaS services through the corporate data center. As a result, network latency is decreased, and network performance improves.
Reduced Security Risk: A cloud security gateway sits between users and branch offices and any target resource, whether inside or outside the organization, and scans traffic for malicious content. This reduces an organization’s risk of phishing, malware infections and other cyberattacks with consistent threat prevention for any type of connection.
Centralized Access Control: Cloud Security Gateway implement a single solution for managing access to an organization’s SaaS and private applications, in prem-based datacenters, IaaS, private or public clouds. This makes it easier for a company to implement and enforce consistent security policies across its entire IT infrastructure, such as zero trust access.
Uniform Data Protection: A cloud security gateway can centrally enforce data protection policies through an integrated cloud DLP, to reduce the risk of unauthorized data exfiltration or accidental data leakage.
Visibility and Compliance: A Cloud Security Gateway provides central logging and monitoring of all branch and user connections across web, SaaS and private applications. This helps an organization get a full audit trail of activity, troubleshoot any issues, and demonstrate compliance with data privacy laws.

The Key Features of a Cloud Security Gateway

Cloud Security Gateway provides all of the security functionality needed to protect an organization, its employees and third parties across all types of connections..

Some of the key capabilities of a Cloud Security Gateway include the following:

Secure Web Gateway (SWG): A Secure Web Gateway monitors web traffic to identify and block potential threats and the leakage of sensitive company data.
Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB): A CASB solution enables organizations to manage access to corporate applications hosted in the cloud. With CASB, an organization can implement centralized, consistent security policy management across all of its cloud resources.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP): Cloud-based solutions pose significant risks to corporate data security if sensitive information is stored on insecure cloud infrastructure. DLP solutions help to ensure that corporate data is not being leaked to unauthorized parties.
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA): ZTNA provides secure remote access that complies with a zero trust access security policy. With ZTNA, access to corporate networks and applications is granted on a case-by-case basis determined by contextual, identity-centric access controls.
Branch Firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS): Branch FWaaS extends enterprise-grade protections to branch locations, ensuring high-performance, secure access to the Internet and corporate cloud resources.
Advanced Threat Prevention: Advanced threat prevention protects against zero-day attacks, phishing, and malicious bots via sandboxed content analysis and intrusion prevention system (IPS) capabilities.
Central Data Protection: Centralized data protection protects against data exfiltration or leakage by maintaining centralized cloud data visibility and policy enforcement.

Check Point Solution

A cloud security gateway provides web security for an organization’s employees and is an essential component of an organization’s cloud network security infrastructure. For more information on how to design and implement an effective security architecture in the cloud, check out this Cloud Security Blueprint.

Harmony SASE offers cloud security gateway capabilities as part of an integrated, comprehensive security service edge (SSE) solution. To learn more about how Harmony SASE can secure your organization’s cloud infrastructure, sign up for a free demo today.