What is Single Sign-On? How SSO Works?
CloudCodes’ CASB solution is a highly efficient cloud security solution that enables enterprises to ensure absolute enterprise security over the vast cloud network. It is a uniquely designed and configured single sign-on (SSO) cloud security solution that typically utilizes a Reverse Proxy mechanism to ensure absolute control over the transmission networks connecting the cloud resources. As a single sign-on solution, a cloud user can directly get access to all the resources that are part of the organization’s vast cloud network to efficiently carry out day-to-day business by logging in directly from the CloudCodes for Business (CFB) application dashboard itself without having to log in to different cloud apps individually.
That is, after logging into our CFB solution, a user immediately gets access to Cloud apps such as Zoho, Gmail, Google Drive, Flock, etc., bringing the vast cloud network to a single point of contact. It’s a robust solution that utilizes a reverse proxy mechanism to safeguard the enterprise’s cloud network from any perceived threats arising out of Internet usage.
Understanding Reverse Proxy Mechanism
Once the enterprise admin has safely configured the reverse proxy settings over the vast cloud network, any request from the end-users of that enterprise for retrieving data sitting on different servers on the cloud will be channelized through this reverse proxy, thereby guarding the extranet against exploiting the corporate resources of the enterprise. The information or data can be retrieved safely on behalf of the enterprise user or client from different servers located in far distant locations.
For the end-user, it appears as if the enterprise’s web server itself retrieves the information. Our CloudCodes CASB solution exactly does that. Users can forward their requests for data or application access from a single sign-on console of our CloudCodes for a Business solution to retrieve information from all the sanctioned Cloud Apps such as Zoho People, Google Drive, Gmail, etc., even though the original data is sitting on different servers located at different locations.
Critical Benefits of Deploying Reverse Proxy Settings
A reverse proxy is deployed at the edge of the cloud network to keep ongoing, real-time surveillance over both outgoing and incoming traffic to establish total control over the transmission lines of an enterprise working with the Cloud. Even though working under covers, the benefits of deploying Reverse Proxy are far too many to keep this sort of a tracking mechanism for potentially safer Cloud Networks, including the following:
- Content Caching – The copies of website pages and content can be easily cached by placing the reverse proxy in far-off dispersed locations geographically to facilitate user experience and significantly reduce page load times.
- Scrubbing traffic for web application security – Reverse proxy setup is the best tool to weed out any malicious packets of data, uninvited hackers’ requests, and even bad bots.
- IP masking – The reverse proxy server terminates the connections first and then reopens them while routing the incoming traffic to mask the Internal IPs. Thus it safeguards the cloud network by denying access to attackers and restraining them from launching any direct-to-IP denial-of-service attacks.
- Load Balancing – The reverse proxy server acts as a gateway between the end-user of the enterprise and the Cloud Apps origin server to efficiently distribute the load evenly over the cloud network, ensuring high availability, and enhancing end-user experience.
It is a sort of proxy server that helps in retrieving the resources on behalf of clients from either one or more than one server. Such resources then return to clients as being originated from the Web server itself.
A reverse proxy hides the existence as well as the characteristics of one origin server or multiple servers. So for our CloudCodes CASB solution, using a reverse proxy mechanism helps in retrieving the app information from Google Drive, Zoho, Gmail, etc., so that users can quickly login to all such business apps at once, directly from our console.
Thus, the deployment of the reverse proxy server in our CloudCodes for Business solution acts as a cloud network traffic cop and efficiently guards all incoming and outgoing traffic 24×7 and ensures absolute compliance with policies at the network level.