Why do businesses need proxies?
Many business owners are unaware of the immense benefits that a proxy server could offer to your organization’s growth. They can offer much more than accessing geo-restricted websites and masking your IP addresses. Even if you are a non-tech-geek, it’s well worth gaining valuable insights for your organization to succeed and stay ahead of your
Many business owners are unaware of the immense benefits that a proxy server could offer to your organization’s growth.
They can offer much more than accessing geo-restricted websites and masking your IP addresses. Even if you are a non-tech-geek, it’s well worth gaining valuable insights for your organization to succeed and stay ahead of your competitors.
What are Proxy servers?
As some of you know, a proxy server acts as an intermediary between your computer and the computer you are trying to connect, forwarding, and requesting data on your behalf. In the process, it masks your IP address making yourself invisible to the target computer. But that’s not only it. You can find more about proxy servers by visiting here.
Benefits that a proxy server can provide for your business
This section will provide you with other benefits that it offers for enterprises and organizations ranging from small to large scale.
Protect sensitive information
Since a proxy server acts as an intermediary between your source computer and the target computer by masking your IP address, it increases online security in many ways. When your IP address is visible on a public network, cyber attackers and hackers can harm you in the following ways:
- They can use your IP address to download illegal content.
- Since they can note your network’s geographical location, they could plan to launch a massive cyberattack in your area that could handicap all your online activities.
- They could organize a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) that could deny access to your private network to access any online resources.
- Steal valuable information about your business, such as credit card or bank account details, when an online transaction does occur.
So, masking your IP address prevents you from all the online theft and attacks.
Enhancing Security
You need to protect your IP address from hackers and your resources such as Databases, files, and other vital resources. Today every online business is at a threat from hackers and cybercriminals. If your data is stolen or breached, then it is costly to repair the damage caused.
When you use a proxy server, it works at the OSI application layer (Open Source Interconnection) model, providing additional security layers between your corporate network and the public internet. Therefore, a proxy server acts as a buffer as they connect and forward requests outside of your network.
However, you need to be cautious that even if you use a proxy server, there is still a likelihood of your data being stolen. In such a scenario, even if the hackers can access the proxy server, they would find it extremely challenging to access the webserver that hosts your database and other relevant software.
Proxy servers act as gatekeepers protecting your corporate network and resources from intruders, which would be a handy option for your online presence.
Accessing geo-restricted websites
Certain websites may impose restrictions on accessing their content depending on the geographical locations that you connect to it. Some of the general examples are movie and music websites, allowing you to download their content only if you log in from a specific region or a country. Ads on YouTube or social media work in a similar fashion.
From a business perspective, let’s say that you have a company in the USA but would like to expand your market to the EU countries. To achieve this expansion, let’s assume that you need to look at the statistics and sales data relevant to similar products in the EU market. However, let’s also assume that there are geo-restrictions imposed on these websites. Hence, you cannot extract any data to plan out your marketing activities to launch your products. As a remedy, you can bypass these restrictions by using a European proxy to get relevant data and plan your business successfully.
Faster connection speed and bandwidth saving
Proxy servers can cache the accessed files and images of the websites that you frequently visit. This common caching mechanism prevents the sites’ web servers from sending the files and images of a web page back to the client every time a visitor/client-device requires them. Instead, the proxy server displays the cached files and frees up the webserver to focus on other crucial tasks.
Another direct benefit of this caching is that it will save quite a lot of bandwidth on your network, allowing your team members to access the internet faster.
Help prevent server crashes
It can be annoying and frustrating to the user when your company’s server crashes and the website becomes inaccessible. However, when you use a proxy server together with cloud storage and peering minimizes this from happening.
All your website’s data is stored across multiple computers distributed in different parts of the world in the cloud. The presence of peering also assists your network in handling more significant traffic.
This is where a proxy server comes into play, where it will create a single web address as the entry point to access. Then a proxy server will balance the requests to each server to make sure none of them get overloaded. As a result, these mechanisms will create a smooth experience for the user to access the content without any server crashes.
Monitoring employee activities
There can be employees who browse inappropriate websites in any organization, such as pornographic and social media websites, during office hours. You, as an employer, would not want this to occur as office hours should be used productively for work.
Proxies can remedy this issue as they can block any websites you don’t want your employees accessing, as shown in the below diagram.
Furthermore, through the use of proxies, your network administrators can monitor through which device your employees have accessed restricted websites on the network. They could allow a particular device to access or restrict access to certain websites depending on your organization’s needs.
Perform anonymous web traffic
Anonymous web traffic is essential for the success of an online organization. However, most businesses fail to understand this. It is also necessary for a specific group of people such as news reporters, whistle-blowers (people who inform an authority or public about corruption taking place in an organization), bank managers, security officers for additional security. This is because they share sensitive information, so it is worth being anonymous about their location, identity, business data, and contacts.
The ideal workaround for this issue would be to set up a private proxy in your network. Then it would be pretty challenging to track all the anonymous activities on your network. On the other hand, a public proxy is not recommended as several people share them. It is easier for hackers to cause malicious acts.
How can proxies protect your brand online
When a brand goes online, it certainly can be a target for some malicious acts by intruders. There are ongoing issues such as ad-counterfeiting, where other people may sell your products on specific online platforms claiming to be you by infringement of copyright laws.
In addition to the greedy hackers, there can be unhappy customers, jealous competitors, and any other evil parties who always plan to cause trouble. They could fill a customer complaint form, initiate chargebacks in PayPal, steal financial data, or any other cybercrime that would result in severe financial loss or getting your online activities banned.
Fortunately, as with every other problem, this issue also has a solution. That is with proxies. As learned in the previous sections, using proxies can significantly benefit your organization and curb the online crime rate.
As discussed above, proxies can help you protect your business’s IP address and other IP addresses that are essentially part of your brand. With the use of proxies, you can be confident that hackers will be unable to access your brand’s identity, including design rights, color marks, patents, products, and every other minute piece of information tied to your brand. The ultimate goal with proxies would be to protect your brand’s business image and reputation from all those who seek to damage it by stealing your information.
So, let’s look at some of the functionalities of proxies that help you to get over this grave issue:
Ad-verification – When you advertise your ads on a geo-restricted website, you cannot verify that your ad is appearing as expected without a proxy. However, by using a proxy, you could connect to these geo-restricted websites and determine that it appears as expected and whether all the settings are applied correctly.
Anti-counterfeiting– It is more likely that your online ads have a chance of being counterfeited without your consent in major E-commerce stores such as Amazon and other online stores. So, you can access those sites with a proxy to verify if someone has infringed your copyrights or if they are any counterfeiting acts.
Retail monitoring- Marketing teams of most advertising agencies use proxies to crawl to websites using different IP addresses to verify that retailers and distributors are selling their products without their authorization.
In addition to the above, proxies can also help you with the following features:
Ability to add extra layers of security– When you send requests via a proxy server to the target website, it acts as a shield. This is undoubtedly beneficial to your brand’s safety, as most things that are considered unsafe would least likely reach your website.
Filters Risks- Your brand certainly interacts with people at different levels, such as through email, social media, or blogs. As you implement all these tasks online, you need to understand that they carry an element of risks. However, with the presence of a proxy server, you can eliminate all such risks. As an example, you would be able to keep away any spam email or any requests from hackers. You also have the feature of whitelisting and blacklisting any IPs with the help of proxies.
Different types of proxies that are suited for your business
Selecting a proxy for your organization by no means is an easy task. You will need to know the different types of proxies out there, such as HTTP, Socks, and Transparent proxies. Then you need to know whether to purchase a proxy that is solely dedicated for you or used a free shared public proxy. It can be overwhelming to make such decisions, but ProxyScrape has made your job a lot less complicated.
Major factors to consider when choosing a proxy provider
If you would like to reap the rewards with your proxies, as mentioned in the benefits section, you need to consider several factors when selecting the provider for your proxy. While it is not the scope of this article to cover those factors, you need to verify if the proxy provider is genuine, the proxy pool they offer, and the types of proxies they provide. We will cover this in detail in a future article.
How can ProxyScrape help your business?
ProxyScrape provides all the different proxies that I have mentioned in the different types of proxies section. We have a reputation for providing the best quality services with a customer-friendly approach with our valuable experience in serving our customers. You now may have a better understanding of the benefits that proxies provide for your organization.
We are looking forward to helping you. Visit our website or contact our customer support anytime.
Conclusion
Now you have a firm grasp of the various benefits that proxies could offer to your organization than when you first read this article. You also have a comprehensive understanding of how proxies protect your brand online. Having a clear view of all the benefits in mind now, we hope you will make the right choice regarding the proxies relevant to your business with ProxyScrape.