Spending money on a proxy?

According to the linked article on Network World, IT spending on security is expected to remain strong, based on a recent worldwide survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers. 75% of IT security professionals indicated that their security spending will either increase or stay the same year over year. As companies move more of their business online, they need to deploy new defenses to protect those assets. Since this is a relatively new trend, there are no real existing protections that they can utilize. Additionally, compliance will continue to drive security spending. Both of these trends are largely recession proof since they are not areas that can be readily cut.

The relative strength in the security market is playing out against an expected slow down in the networking market. Forrester predicts that the crisis will slow growth in software and IT services to 3-5% down from an average growth rate of 9-12%. So the question is, are you spending money on your proxy infrastructure?

8 Things You Can Do With A Proxy

I came across this article in a developers forum and thought it was rather unique at taking a look at other functions proxies are capable of.

Many of us take for granted our proxy protects us from web threats, but there's a lot more the typical proxy can do as well. Some of them are obvious, like URL rewriting, but functions like data scrubbing may not be something you're doing today. DLP (data leakage protection) is still relatively new to proxies, and may be something you need to look at, especially with newer privacy laws coming out all the time (For example, Nevada is all set to have a new privacy law around email - which includes webmail - making it illegal to send any personal information that's not encrypted via email).

5 Mistakes You'd Do Over Again

Network World ran an article a couple of days ago on 5 mistakes IT admins would make again. The article is linked above. The first mistake covers an IT admin who recommended a proxy implementation to solve some bandwidth issues on the Internet link caused by end-users downloading porn from the internet. Although he was fired for standing his ground 10 years ago, he said he'd do it all over again.

And he was right, today, proxies are one of the best devices an organization can implement to prevent unauthorized use of the Internet at work, while protecting end-users from malware, viruses and other threats on the Internet. While many organizations may not admit to having a proxy in their network, the numbers show that most actually use some sort of proxy device for security and content filtering. Blue Coat Systems for example reports that 81% of the Fortune Global 500 implement their products, and 96 of the largest 100 companies use their products.