Promote Cybersecurity With IP Proxies and a VPN
Many people using the internet aren’t aware that their internet service provider (ISP) assigns an internet protocol address (IP) to your home every time you connect. As a residential customer of a regular domestic ISP, you’ll be assigned a residential IP when you log on to the web.
It’s a numeric address, more like a telephone number, which can pinpoint you to an area of a country anywhere in the world. For example, visiting a website such as whatismyipaddress.com might indicate that your IP is 46.69.180.240, that you’re on a static connection provided by a well-known ISP, and that you’re accessing the internet from a given country and area.
Benefits of IP Proxies
There is nothing particularly exciting there. But if you were running a small business or medium-sized enterprise (SME), then your IP address will have been assigned by a data center, as opposed to a residential IP address. Data centers provide businesses with servers that can handle much more data traffic than their residential counterparts.
They have fewer outages, i.e., better-guaranteed server ‘uptimes,’ and often originate from huge server farms in countries north of the Arctic Circle. These cooler locations exist because data centers produce lots of heat from all the electricity they use; keeping a building cooler is easier in Finland in February than somewhere like Amarillo in August!
Aside from being more expensive and more reliable, those are the only differences between residential and business data center servers.
Large corporations like AWS (Amazon Web services) or Microsoft’s Azure network usually supply data center servers. Their IP addresses give away their locations to internet professionals and potential hackers alike. This is why some businesses opt to have all the advantages of US residential proxies. Many companies pay specialized ISPs to supply robust data center servers that display residential IP addresses.
This might seem like a retrograde step initially, but it’s because some businesses would prefer that their internet presence be cloaked. In short, they want to be able to run their business online but appear to any hackers or competitors as individuals operating from their kitchen table laptops at home. Why would they want to do this, and how do they achieve it?
How can you use IP Proxies to Promote Cybersecurity?
The best way to use IP proxies to promote cybersecurity is to utilize ‘static’ residential IPs or a ‘dynamic’ residential proxy server pool. This means that their robust servers are of data center quality but appear to be placed in residential areas.
Businesses pay for this cloaking for several reasons:
- For enhanced security via anonymity.
- So they can gain business intelligence via ‘web scraping.’
- To test advanced search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
- To test ‘dynamic pricing’ practices.
Let’s look at these one at a time:
A static residential IP address means a company might rent just one or two ‘fixed’ residential IP addresses; they never change. This is very useful for testing some of the web-based business practices mentioned above, but it is much less useful for security through anonymity.
Dynamic Residential IP Addresses
Suppose a business uses a pool of dynamic residential IP addresses. In that case, it effectively constantly accesses the Internet from many servers worldwide or national locations. This approach is good cybersecurity practice because hackers could never hope to find these IP addresses as they change so frequently.
Still, every time the company wants to use an IP address for commercial web testing, it has to alter the parameters of its software, which can be annoying and time-consuming.
In either case, a residential IP address keeps a business ‘under the radar’ of potential hackers, making it easier to stay safe. Let’s say that a disgruntled customer of a holiday company has an appalling stay at an overpriced hotel for a couple of weeks and decides to use their hacking skills to add some pornography to the company’s website out of mischief.
The hacker knows that the IP address would almost certainly be from a data center, but try as they might, they can’t find the company to hack. That’s because the business hides behind a residential IP address in a completely different part of the world. Holiday company – 1, hacker – Nil!
Web Scraping
For a business to know what its competitors are doing, it might like to try to download all the prices and availability of hundreds of products from the competitor’s website(s). To do this efficiently, they use scraping ‘bots’ that perform data mining through the target website and download all the information in a computer-friendly format.
However, this process will almost certainly violate that website’s terms and conditions. Most websites have ‘scraper detectors’ that find bots operating from data center IP addresses and block them—not to mention sue the bot’s owners in the courts. However, residential proxy and VPN services can use clever techniques to cloak the bots so they can’t be found.
Dynamic pricing and advanced SEO
Sometimes, large companies only want specific products to appear in specified geographic locations. For example, they might want to sell air conditioning in Australia but heating units in Alaska. Furthermore, they may want to adjust and track those products’ prices by geography and year’s season.
If those products are only meant to show up on search engines in specified places, with differing prices by location, companies need to use ‘local’ servers from a national or international pool of residential IP proxies to test that their marketing techniques are working as intended. Another option is to use a free VPN to change your IP address to fit the location you want to browse the net and do business in.
Summing Up
There are many advantages for businesses to use residential proxy servers to access the internet; choosing a reputable provider to facilitate that process is as important as a company’s main online presence in itself.
Utilize these features to ensure you stay safe, maintain robust cybersecurity and avoid costly litigation when sensitive data is stolen or leaked online.
