Web filtering software is moving to the cloud – that all-knowing, pervasive, sometimes unreliable cluster of computers in the digital ether – and it’s going to watch your every move online and tattle to your boss.
Zscaler, a Santa Clara start-up created by serial security entrepreneur Jay Chaudhry, is publicly unveiling itself Monday. Over the last decade, Mr. Chaudhry has founded such companies as AirDefense (sold to Motorola), CipherTrust (sold to Secure Computing), SecureIt (sold to VeriSign) and CoreHarbor (sold to USinterworking.) That makes him kind of like the Brett Favre of security entrepreneurs — he keeps coming back.
Zscaler’s idea is to relieve companies of the tiresome and costly burden of managing Web filtering and security on their own servers. Instead, the cloud-based service, which is rented to companies by the month, acts like a Web proxy, intercepting all incoming and outbound HTTP traffic from employees and scrubbing it for malware and online activity that violates company policy.
More and more filtering companies are doing this, and IT people love it. I can tell you having worked in Internet filtering for most of the last decade that IT people hate being “the web police” and would much rather off-load this to a service, where HR people and managers can deal with it from their web browsers. The problem with “in the cloud” filtering always has been the latency issues of sending all your web traffic through a remote proxy. When I was at N2H2 we actually used this model in 1999 for home filtering. It’s a really nice solution, but we struggled with the latency issue. Things have improved quite a bit in the decade since, and ZScaler isn’t alone-Websense, Google, and other companies are getting into “in the cloud” filtering as well.
Filed under: Filtering, Filtering Companies
