What Is a Forward Proxy?

What Is a Forward Proxy?



A forward proxy is far more than a traffic controller. As an intermediary, the proxy can shield users from direct access to or from bad actors as well as prevent them from compromising data and enterprise resources—intentionally or not. It operates “inline,” sitting directly in the flow of traffic, allowing an organization to identify any challenges to security and enforce needed policies in real time.To get more news about Http-proxy, you can visit pyproxy.com official website.

While not a direct comparison of proxy to firewall, it’s worth noting that a cloud-based forward proxy can also inspect encrypted traffic. As most of today’s traffic is encrypted, it’s critical to have visibility into it, but the process of decrypting, inspecting, and re-encrypting traffic is compute-intensive. Appliance-based firewalls, with inherent processing limitations, can’t handle a high volume of encryption without adding latency (however, a cloud firewall can).
Increasingly, discussions of forward proxies go hand in hand with talk of cloud access security brokers (CASBs), cloud security tools that can be deployed in forward proxy mode. With a CASB, a software agent installed on a user device forwards traffic to an inspection point in the cloud, which applies real-time security policies to foster safe connections with cloud-based resources such as SaaS apps and IaaS platforms.

As the adoption of SaaS apps and remote work increases, using a CASB’s cloud-based forward proxy mode (as opposed to a firewall or a proxy appliance, on-premises or deployed virtually) can be a powerful way to protect an organization’s managed devices.

However, when it comes to unmanaged devices, i.e., BYOD or third-party partner devices, forward proxies aren’t quite able to ensure the security of their transactions since they come from the requestor, not the client. Indeed, this use case is better served by the forward proxy’s sibling, the reverse proxy.
Forward Proxy vs. Reverse Proxy
It’s easy to get forward and reverse proxies confused, so let’s break them down.

By sitting in front of a web server, a reverse proxy server ensures no clients communicate directly with the server. A forward proxy sits in front of client endpoints to intercept incoming requests and ensure no servers communicate directly with a client such as a web browser. These types of proxies sound functionally similar, but forward proxies usually depend on a software agent installed on endpoints to forward traffic, while reverse proxies do not.

Another key difference is that reverse proxies contain a load balancer, which can be used to optimize client requests that could otherwise overwhelm a single server with high demand, promoting high availability and better load times by taking pressure off the backend server. They mainly do this in two different ways:

A reverse proxy can cache content from an origin server in temporary storage, and then send the content to clients that request it without further transacting with the server (this is called web acceleration). DNS can be used to route requests evenly among multiple reverse proxies.
If a large website or other web service uses multiple origin servers, a reverse proxy can distribute requests among them to ensure even server loads.
Why a Forward Proxy Is Needed Today
The decades-old secure perimeter model, also called “castle and moat” security, was designed to keep bad traffic from entering the internal network from the internet. Today, with applications in the cloud and many users outside the traditional perimeter, connecting from everywhere to your private apps, SaaS, and data in public clouds, that model has become outdated.

If you stick with the legacy model, your users connect through a virtual private network (VPN)—on an MPLS link, in the case of workers in branch offices—to your data center, which then sends the traffic through your outbound gateway security stack to the cloud and back again. This widens your attack surface, opening you up to significant risk. Plus, it creates a terrible digital experience for your users.

Cloud applications were designed to be accessed directly, via the shortest path, for a fast, productive experience. Appliances in the data center that allow passthrough are simply not up to the task. For fast, direct, and secure connections, you need to leverage a forward proxy that takes advantage of the performance and scale of the cloud.