Security threats, productivity loss, and regulatory compliance are pushing more businesses to adopt URL filtering solutions into their organizational infrastructure. The Web today is increasingly interactive, dynamic and complex. This means that URL filtering solutions that accurately categorize and filter the most up to date Web sites, including blogs and social networks, can provide a sustainable competitive advantage for hardware and software vendors and service providers.
GlobalView URL Filtering is typically integrated into a service provider environment or a vendor device such as a Web Security Gateway. It consists of an engine that resides in existing Web security offerings and an “in the cloud” detection and categorization center (the GlobalView Network). These provide URL filtering and Web security functionality.
After integration within the service provider environment or vendor device, URLs can be fed to the GlobalView URLF engine to determine the URL category. The engine first checks its local cache for URL categorizations - typically 99% of queries receive a local response. If necessary, the GlobalView URLF engine queries the cloud-based GlobalView Network for relevant updates. The vendor device or service provider server then blocks, allows or strips content according to defined policies for the returned categories.
URLs are allocated at least one of 64 categories. 8 of these categories are security related. A URL may have up to 5 categories associated with it.
Commtouch has developed an auto-learning Locally Cached Database (LCDB) that adjusts its content according to the actual browsing habits of the users served. The result is local categorization data for over 99% of all queries.
For the small percentage of the cases where a query is transmitted to the Commtouch GlobalView Network, the query and result usually add up to no more than 1kB. This is an order of magnitude less than an average Web page which could be tens to hundreds of kilobytes. Commtouch has performed measurements within enterprises using GlobalView URL Filtering and found that the queries to the cloud amounted to a mere 0.1% of total HTTP traffic.
The additional traffic created by Commtouch’s cloud architecture is therefore negligible.
Commtouch has a unique migration kit that facilitates a simple move to Commtouch when renewal time rolls around. You can continue to use your existing configuration and policies but benefit from Commtouch’s more advanced and secured solution. The migration kit maps Commtouch categorization to your existing categorization scheme, freeing you from the responsibility of configuration updates.
GlobalView URLF supports accurate categorization of embedded URLs – For example:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&u=http://www.cnn...
- would be categorized as “News” and “Translators”.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:K_BgMYvwL50J:www.sw...
Many
competing solutions will simply categorize the translation or cache site, which means they can become an easy workaround for people to access disallowed or insecure sites. The accuracy of GlobalView URLF prevents users from bypassing the system by using such sites. Similarly GlobalView URLF also correctly categorizes archive sites and content delivery sites.
GlobalView URLF includes an integrated engine that provides categories for a URL upon request. Whether it’s HTTP, HTTPS, FTP or even IP, the partner device extracts the relevant URL from the session and passes it to the Commtouch URLF engine in order to receive the most updated categories.
GlobalView URLF can be embedded into a range of endpoints including hardware devices and applications such as:
The solution is also ideal for service providers such as:
Integration of GlobalView URLF is simple and enables these solutions to provide a new level of URL filtering for applications such as:
GlobalView URLF ensures that the categorizations provided per URL (up to 5) truly reflect the nature of the site. This necessitates advanced automatic algorithms as well as understanding and analysis of multi-layered and embedded URLS. GlobalView URLF also indexes IP addresses since a hostname may be identified by one or more names and IPs (aliases).
GlobalView URLF provides highly accurate granular categorization of multi-category websites. This implies choosing the correct granularity on a per site basis. Some sites neatly fit into a single category with the exception of a particular “corner” of the site for example, the swimsuit pages of the otherwise sports-oriented Sports Illustrated site (which itself is found in the news oriented CNN). Web 2.0 environments such as blogs on the other hand may contain millions of URLs representing every possible Web category.
GlobalView URLF also supports embedded URLs – these are a common feature of search, translation and content aggregation sites. Correct categorization as provided by the Commtouch solution prevents potential bypass by usage of these sites.
GlobalView URLF uses a combination of data center infrastructure (the GlobalView Network) and a wide range of data sources, to maintain a database with comprehensive URL coverage and high categorization accuracy.
Extensive coverage for relevant productivity and compliance categories is ensured by combining a range of sources and focused analysis:
Extensive coverage for real time security is ensured by combining the following sources:
