Modern business organizations are constantly on the lookout for the best, most advanced cybersecurity measures and data management technologies that can help them beat their rivals and achieve many business goals.

With most businesses transitioning to a remote workforce due to the pandemic, modern companies are now facing the biggest challenge of them all – how to protect their employees, data, and operations and still manage to scale up.

Thankfully, that is where proxy servers can help. Most internet users have heard of proxy servers, and they have some basic understanding of the things they can do, but it’s all vague knowledge. For most of them, a proxy is just a tool for safely using public WiFi.

For most businesses, proxies are an excellent solution for unlocking geo-restricted content online. However, there is much more to proxies than that. Let’s delve deeper into proxies, their typical use cases, and the things they can and cannot do.

Basics of proxy servers

Proxies can do so much for modern companies regarding security and brand protection. Companies can use them for numerous business functions, such as improving cybersecurity measures and customer experience.

Proxy servers are gateways between website servers and internet users. They have pools of IP addresses for securing data traffic on the web between two or more protocols.

When a client sends a request to view some content online, a proxy reroutes that request through its server to present the wanted content, thus hiding the user’s IP address and location in the process.

Proxies can help both ordinary internet users and businesses save time and improve security, privacy, anonymity, and functionality by ensuring a safe and secure flow of data online without any disturbances or interruptions. Because they have their IP addresses, proxies are excellent tools for web scraping and extracting accurate, organized, and filtered data from target websites.

Business uses for proxies

The list of business use cases for proxies is virtually endless but let’s name some of the most important.

Improved bandwidth stability and speed

Proxies can speed up your internet connection and save bandwidth on a network by improving your internet connection’s stability. Even if you need to provide access to networks to multiple users, proxies can improve bandwidth by compressing traffic, caching web pages and data, and removing ads from websites to allow faster and easier access to the web.

Employee bandwidth usage monitoring and control

Businesses can save time and resources by integrating proxy servers into their internal networks. If your employees can access the internet independently, they can access non-secure content and expose your business network to a wide range of cyber threats. Instead of dealing with the consequences, proxies can help determine how many devices will have network access and the sites they can visit.

Improved cybersecurity

Proxies mitigate cybersecurity risks and significantly reduce the chance of a data breach. They add another security layer to safeguard incoming and outgoing data traffic and servers.

They use their buffering properties to relay any data flow from external servers, thus preventing third parties from ever reaching your servers where your sensitive business data is stored.

Improved anonymity

Proxy servers, especially a SOCKS5 proxy, offer additional identity protection and anonymity by preventing third parties from monitoring or tracking your traffic online. Visit this website to delve deeper into SOCKS5 proxies and their capabilities.

Types of proxies

There are many different types of proxies, each with a unique set of features:

• HTTP proxies – perfect for working with HTTP web pages.
• SSL proxies – ideal for managing TCP connections and relaying.
• FTP proxies – perfect for caching and relaying FTP requests.
• SOCKS5 proxies – the go-to solutions for managing operations that require multilayering of data. A SOCKS5 proxy handles all data traffic related to UDP and TCP connections.
• Residential proxies – ideal for tasks that require a pool of whitelisted IP addresses (web scraping geo-restricted content).
• Datacenter proxies – excellent for boosting internet speeds.

Now, let’s see what proxies can and cannot do.

Proxy  “CANs” and “CANNOTs”

Let’s list the things a proxy server can do:

• A proxy uses IP address manipulation to increase internet users’ anonymity online.
• Proxies can cache data – a property that allows users to speed up connections and accelerate access to required resources.
• Proxies allow you to determine how many users will have access to a specific network and limit their access to data.
• You can use them for web scraping and data filtering without the target websites detecting, blocking, or banning them.
• Many companies use proxies to ban various technologies or restrict access to content.
• Proxies can hide your IP address and prevent third parties from monitoring or tracking your online activities.

Now, let’s see what proxies can’t do:

• They can’t perform the semantic analysis of downloaded data.
• Unlike some proxies, such as HTTP, a SOCKS proxy can’t filter the extracted data.
• Proxies can’t handle external requests, except for a SOCKS5 proxy.
• They can’t optimize both the server-side and the client-side performance.
• Most proxies can’t act as a protocol getaway.
• Proxy servers can’t terminate TLS/SSL.

Conclusion

Proxies offer many benefits and valuable properties to internet users, especially businesses. Their unique features allow business organizations to improve various aspects, including overall security and data management. Since they can help monitor competition and extract data from any website, proxies have become a valuable asset to modern companies.