WEBGAP
An Affordable Way to Physically Isolate Yourself from Cyber Risk

Hardly a week goes by without the media reporting a big business or a nation’s government suffering a major data breach. In fact, about 3.5 billion people had their personal information accessed, stolen, and used by cybercriminals in top two of the 15 biggest breaches of this century alone. Industry reports suggest that 98 percent of these cyber incidents originate from the email and web browser and directly attack users when they are casually browsing the internet. Trying to stop each cyber-attack as they come is impossible amid the sheer volume and variety of attacks. To that end, organizations of all sizes and sectors are seeking alternate ways to reduce their attack surface and strengthen their cybersecurity posture.

But with the deck seemingly stacked in the attackers’ favor, how can businesses protect themselves? An innovative technology that shows immense promise against this backdrop is remote browser isolation. A new cybersecurity model, remote browser isolation physically isolates an internet user’s browsing activity from their local networks and infrastructure, thus, alienating associated cyber risks in the process. Despite its benefits, there are two major issues of browser isolation that limit the technology from being widely adopted: scale and cost. Most organizations do not have significant budgets and the necessary infrastructure, making browser isolation mostly for the few rather than the many.

Recognizing the need for a cost-effective, secure, and highly-scalable solution, WEBGAP, a CA-based firm, has developed a namesake, simple, proprietary browser isolation platform designed to physically isolate its users from web-based cyber-attacks, thereby, allowing them to use the internet without worrying about malware. “Anyone can isolate a browser but the real trick lies in doing so at vast scale and in a cost-effective way. So we built WEBGAP with these problems in mind,” says Guise Bule, co-Founder and CEO, WEBGAP.

The founding team, which comprises Bule and Jun Yang—who also serves as WEBGAP’s CTO—came up with the idea for WEBGAP when working with the National Nuclear Security Administration at Lawrence Livermore and Sandia laboratories, building browser isolation platforms for federal government employees using the Safeweb model. “While we were hosting these platforms in high-security environments, the federal government kept telling us that we needed to get the price per user down to single-digit dollars per user if we wanted to win their long-term business,” adds Bule.

But this just wasn’t possible with the non-persistent desktop virtualization that they were utilizing.

The duo realized that they needed to move away from virtualization and toward containerization, which requires approximately ten times less server infrastructure and is infinitely more scalable.

When we first started WEBGAP, we aimed to drive browser isolation solutions into mass market adoption by lowering their price to single digit dollars per user. We set out to protect the many that desperately need the protection, rather than the few with the budget to afford it

To that end, Bule and Yang created WEBGAP based on a containerized and grid distributed architecture. “When we first started WEBGAP, we aimed to drive browser isolation solutions into mass-market adoption by lowering their price to single-digit dollars per user. We set out to protect the many that desperately need the protection, rather than the few with the budget to afford it,” mentions Bule. The platform can efficiently scale to accommodate millions of simultaneous users. Its innovative ‘web page run-time rendering’ feature decomposes webpages to strip them of potentially malicious code, before recomposing them into pure HTML for display to the end-user, providing a safer internet and isolating users from malware and web-based cyber-attacks. What’s more is WEBGAP uses a DOM-based approach, which means businesses and users can tightly integrate the platform with the local browser to encounter a real native browser user experience—one that supports browser plugins and add-ons.

WEBGAP is available in two deployments: WEBGAP Go and WEBGAP Enterprise. WEBGAP Go is the multi-tenant, no-frills, remote browser service for individuals and organizations with smaller amounts of users, who do not require platform customization and provides users with a fully managed and fully hosted remote browser. It is priced at 5 dollars per user, per month and can be quickly installed onto any cloud/virtual/physical server and lets users connect over the internet from any browser. WEBGAP Enterprise, on the other hand, is for larger organizations with a vast number of users and is also a perfect fit for web gateways. WEBGAP Enterprise is all set for launch in the next few months. WEBGAP also has plans to present a system control console, tenant-admin console, and an end-user self-service portal in its next enterprise release. Besides, the firm is also looking at implementing additional capabilities such as single sign-on integration, user activity analysis, malware activity snapshot, a secure web gateway integration, and enhancements around the plugin support. Furthermore, Bule also has plans to extend browser isolation to email attachments. “We believe that the remote browser isolation model is the future of endpoint security and we will continue to work comprehensively, seamlessly, and effectively to isolate our users from the risks of the public internet,” wraps up Bule.