Security Thought for Thursday: The Proxy Purists Were Right

Neil MacDonald, a blogger for Gartner, recently published an articled titled: Security Thought for Thursday: The Proxy Purists Were Right. And of course the title immediately caught my eye, since I write about proxies and am one of the staunch evangelists for proxy technologies.

What's interesting about MacDonald's article is that he's not only talking about web proxies but any proxy. His take is that:

A proxy-based model for externalizing and enforcing security policy is the right approach and becoming more, not less, relevant.

...

All of these technologies allow us to inject our policy as traffic goes back and forth.

The last sentence shows the true power of the proxy. It's that control through policy that makes the proxy the valuable piece in the network infrastructure.

MacDonald makes another good point in the following:

Increasingly we don’t own or control all of the pieces of IT (the users, the devices, the components, the services, etc) that composite together to build a system. Are proxy-based models the best way ensure the application of security policy moving forward? I believe in most cases they will be.

So do we.