October 25, 2017 Leave a Comment
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Security

Gartner releases report on the transformation of the SWG market

On September 12, Gartner – the leading research and advisory company – released a competitive report on the secure web gateway (SWG) market. The report highlights the significant transformation as the traditional SWG gives way to a new platform –– the secure internet gateway (SIG).

Gartner states, “the SIG service platform offers a new promise to its customers — a richer overall set of capabilities delivered by a single entity — that could potentially offset or displace some or all of the bulk of on-premises solutions of yesterday (especially for branch office locations) and stand-alone SaaS offerings.”

By combining SWG functionality with other solutions such as a DNS resolution service and a CASB, a SIG provides:

  • Ease of deployment
  • Higher performance and lower latency
  • Ability to filter network traffic
  • Threat prevention beyond just HTTP, HTTPS & FTP
  • Deeper control of SaaS applications

Why is this shift significant for Cisco? Because we have a role in leading this transformation.

Cisco Umbrella, the industry’s first SIG, is already delivering core functionalities outlined in the report and is designed as a platform in which additional capabilities can be added. Today, Umbrella combines DNS-layer security with a selective proxy to perform deeper inspection. This allows our customers to take advantage of the higher performance of DNS for the bulk of requests and leverage deeper content inspection for only unknown or risky websites.

This is just one example of how Umbrella is challenging traditional SWG providers. Cisco will continue to evolve and lead the transformation to SIG. To learn more about this transformation, download a copy of the Gartner report.

Source: Gartner, Competitive Landscape: Secure Web Gateways, Lawrence Pingree, Ruggero Contu, 12 September 2017.

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