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The Critical Importance of Proxies For Business – Data Security

Critical Importance of Proxies For Business. Data security is crucial to all businesses today. Most companies often pay a high amount for antivirus software.

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Importance of Proxies For Business

Data security is crucial to all businesses today. Most companies often pay hefty amounts of cash for robust antivirus software to ensure safety. Data, however, shows that firewalls and antivirus security are not all that is required for data protection today.

Hackers have, over time, changed tact and are now targeting the people that use computers rather than computer hardware or software as it was in the past. 80% of hackers say that reliance on firewalls and antivirus protection is obsolete data security protection methods.

This is the reason why proxies are very crucial business data protection tools. Read more on Oxylabs about how proxies can elevate your business and keep it safe!

1. What are proxies?

The translation of the word proxy means “an authority to represent” another person. Proxies are mostly used in the electoral process. In the world of IT, proxy servers act as intermediaries between your computer and the internet. The proxy server receives all your browser’s web requests and channels them to its servers.

The proxy then directs the information to the destination servers, meaning that these servers are only able to access the proxy server’s IP address. The received data is also routed through the proxy servers back to your computers. This whole process is designed to veil your internet protocol (IP) address.

The IP address can reveal your computer’s geographical location, address, or internet service provider. Hackers often use this information to waylay their victims when planning their data security breaches. There are, however, other uses of proxy servers beyond data protection. Let’s check out the benefits of proxies.

Importance of Proxies Server

2. Benefits of proxy servers

Here’s how your business will gain by using proxies.

a. Internet usage and access control

Organizations use proxy servers to monitor and control their employees’ access to the internet. There are many reasons why a business might choose to monitor and restrict internet usage. First, it can save the business many work hours that would have been spent on particular web activities during work hours.

The IT department can, therefore, use a proxy server to restrict or deny access to specific sites and redirect the employees with a polite notice back to the business’s networks. Proxy servers log all web requests so they can be used to monitor those websites that employees spend too much time on.

b. To enhance bandwidth efficiency

Proxy servers cache the most commonly accessed web pages, significantly improving the overall performance of your business’s network. They will save copies of webpages locally so that whenever a request is made, the proxy server will send the most recent cached copy of the webpage.

If a myriad of requests is made on the same webpage, the proxy server will only send one request to that page, which saves the company’s bandwidth and improves efficiency.

c. Increasing privacy

Every year billions of people lose access to their data in the increasing cases of data theft or exposure. Data breaches have become a prevalent internet danger, and reports reveal that the costs of these breaches can vary from industry to industry, but could cost your business $1.25 million to $8.19 million. Due to the steep increase in these crimes, GDPR rules now force organizations to report these incidents to the relevant authorities during the first 72 hours of detection.

Failure to comply with these laws could lead to hefty fines. With such laws becoming commonplace, business requires to up their game in data responsibility, transparency, and accountability when capturing, using, and storing personal data. Data is precious not just to businesses but to cybercriminals as well.

Misuse of personal data for fraudulent activities has become very profitable with identity theft, accounting for over 65% of all data security breaches on the internet.

The recorded  72% of all data security breaches involve phishing emails, where employees receive mail that often leads to data loss or identity theft.

Since a proxy server hides the IP address of a computer, hackers will find it much more difficult to access your employee’s personal information, since such identifiers are kept hidden by the proxy server. This privacy feature significantly reduces hacking attempts.

enhance bandwidth efficiency

d. Access to geo-blocked resources

Privacy is crucial for online safety, but businesses can do much more with this feature. Some websites block content imposing restrictions on individuals, businesses, or the government’s access to certain information.

A proxy server can hide your IP address, which means that such restrictions will not impact your web activity. The proxy server can give you acceptable geolocation, giving you access to the uncensored internet.

e. Web scraping

Web scraping is the process of extracting or harvesting mass data from online sources. It is used to mine masses of data at high speeds, which are then analyzed and saved in easy-to-digest formats such as CSV. Business web scrape data to access information that makes them more competitive in the marketplace.

Websites are, however, engineered to block data scraping to prevent spamming or misuse of web resources. If a site recognizes that one IP address is making too many web requests synonymously, it will ban or flag it.

Proxy servers from a rotating pool can counteract this effect. The proxies will not only hide your IP address when web scraping but will also provide different IP addresses to prevent the detection of web scraping activities.

There are two main types of proxies that a business can use – data center proxies and residential proxies. Let’s dive deeper into each.

3. Datacenter proxies

Datacenter proxies are sold or given away for free by third-party cloud-based providers. They are cheap and easy to access and offer the required anonymity for privacy when online. Datacenter proxies, however, do not provide valid IP addresses, since they are not affiliated with internet service providers. They are, therefore, much more comfortable to detect in activities such as web scraping.

Web scraping Datacenter proxies

4. Pros of data center proxies

a. Anonymity features

They provide adequate anonymity features by hiding an IP address. You will, therefore, enjoy a level of security when online, and you can use them to access geo-blocked content.

b. They are cheap even in bulk

Datacenter servers operate as IP farms and provide large pools of IP addresses very affordably. Private Datacenter proxies can, therefore, be utilized to build a rotating pool of proxies for affordable web scraping activities.

5. Cons of data center proxies

a. They are easily banned

They are not real IP addresses, so a keen web administrator can easily detect them when web scraping. These proxies are, consequently, more easily prone to IP bans.

b. Public data center proxies are very unsafe for use

They are often used for nefarious web activity by malicious actors, and their servers can be utilized as gateways to your business’s data servers by hackers. Since public proxies are not backed by a registered company that is regulated by law, they can lead to dangerous and expensive data security breaches.

c. Public data center proxies are slow

Some open data center proxies are often very slow because they are often burdened with massive loads of traffic at a go.

6. Residential proxies

Internet service providers sell residential proxies. They, therefore, offer valid IP addresses. They are the best types of proxies out there but come at a steep cost.

7. Pros of residential proxies

a. They are an authentic IP address

A residential IP address closely resembles a computer IP address. These proxies, therefore, are easier to web scrape with, because they are not easily identified during web scraping activities

b. They offer better data security

Residential proxies do not only provide anonymity when online but are better at data protection than public data center proxies. Since regulated internet service providers sell residential proxies, they are mandated to protect your data by law.

8. Con of residential proxies

a. They are expensive

Since services such as web scraping require pools of rotating proxies, you will need to purchase several residential proxies that are costly and difficult to access.

Conclusion

There are many benefits of proxy servers to businesses. These affordable and easy-to-maintain privacy enhancement tools can easily be overlooked in the market. Such actions can come at a premium cost for a business owner. It is essential to access the best proxy servers out there for enhanced business data security and privacy enhancement when online.

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Big Data

How to Work with Strings in Google BigQuery?

How to Work with Strings in Google BigQuery? Key Features of Google BigQuery, BigQuery String Functions, BigQuery Substring Function

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How to Work with Strings in Google BigQuery

Organizations nowadays produce a massive amount of data, simply storing and organizing, which is not enough and serves no purpose. It, therefore, becomes essential for businesses not just to collect and store the data but also to analyze it to derive valuable business insights.

Still, there comes a challenge of managing, maintaining, and analyzing these exponentially growing data using the outdated data warehouse technologies and here comes the role of Google BigQuery, one of the well-known and widely accepted Cloud-based Data Warehouse Applications, which allows you to trawl through vast amounts of data and find the correct data for analysis.

It offers various functions such as BigQuery Create Table, which helps store the records, BigQuery Substring, which eases down the complex calculations, and many others.

In this article, we will introduce you to Google BigQuery and its key features? We will also have an overview of the different BigQuery String Functions and BigQuery Substrings and how to work with them.

1. What is Google BigQuery?

Google BigQuery is a cost-effective enterprise data warehouse solution and part of Google Cloud’s comprehensive data analytics platform for business agility.

It helps businesses manage and analyze the data with the help of inbuilt features like Machine Learning, Business Intelligence, and Geospatial Analysis.

Google BigQuery’s serverless architecture allows high-scale operations and execution of SQL queries over large datasets.

It is an enterprise-ready cloud-native data warehouse that covers the whole analytics ecosystem, including ingestion, processing, and storage of data, followed by advanced analytics and collaboration, enabling scalable analysis of the stored data.

2. Key Features of Google BigQuery

Key Features of Google BigQuery

Given below are some of the key features of Google BigQuery: –

  • Scalability – Google BigQuery is quite elastic in that it manages a vast amount of data and allows upscale or downscale per demand.
  • Automated Data Transfer – Google BigQuery supports automated data transfer through the BigQuery Data Transfer Service, which automates data movement into BigQuery regularly.
  • Real-Time Analytics – Google BigQuery facilitates the analysis of high-volume data in real-time.
  • User-Friendly Interface – BigQuery is a highly user-friendly platform and requires just a basic understanding of SQL commands, ETL tools, etc.
  • Multicloud Functionality – Multicloud Functionality is another feature of Google BigQuery which allows data analysis across multiple cloud platforms. BigQuery can compute the data at its original location without moving it to different processing zones.

3. BigQuery String Functions

Strings are a crucial part of the dataset whose manipulation and transformation significantly impact your analysis. There are various functions to modify and transform the Strings in Google BigQuery. Let us have a look at some of the essential BigQuery String Functions: –

a) CONCAT –

The CONCAT function helps to combine two or more strings to provide a single result. Here all the values must be Bytes or Data Types; if any of the input arguments is null, then the function will return the null value.

Syntax: –

SELECT
CONCAT(‘A’, ” “, “B”)

b) TRIMMING –

The TRIMMING function removes any particular character from the String. Trimming operations are of three types: –

c) TRIM (value1[, value2]):

TRIM removes all the leading and trailing characters that match value2. In case no character is specified, whitespaces will be removed by default.

d) LTRIM (value1[, value2]):

LTRIM Function removes the character specified from the left, and similar to the TRIM Function, if a character is not defined, it will remove the whitespaces by default.

e) RTRIM (value1[, value2]):

RTRIM Function removes the character specified from the right side, and again if no character is defined, then whitespaces will be removed by default.

Example: –

SELECT
‘Original String_’,
TRIM(‘ Original String_’) AS trimmed,
LTRIM(‘ Original String_’) AS left_trim,
RTRIM(‘ Original String_’, “_”) AS right_trim

f) REPLACE –

The REPLACE function can replace all the substrings within a string with new substrings.

Example: –

SELECT complaint_description,REPLACE (complaint_description,’Coyote’,’doggy’)as replaced_value FROM `bigquery-public-data.austin_311.311_service_requests` LIMIT 5
Here “Coyote” will be replaced with “doggy”.

g) CASE FUNCTIONS –

CASE functions are used to change the case of a particular string, and they are of two types LOWERCASE and UPPERCASE.

h) LOWERCASE –

LOWERCASE can be used to return the original String with all the alphabetic characters in the lower case for string arguments.

Syntax: –

LOWER(value)

I) UPPERCASE –

UPPERCASE can be used to return the original String with all the alphabetic characters in the upper case for string arguments.

Syntax: –

UPPER(value)

4. BigQuery Substring Function

BigQuery Substring Function helps to extract a section of the String in BigQuery. It helps make calculations and visualizations easier for the users and can be used in conjunction with other BigQuery parameters, which can help enhance the performance.

Syntax: –

SUBSTR (value, position[, length])

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed Google BigQuery and the key features that make it useful for businesses. We also discussed different BigQuery String Functions, which can be used to transform and manipulate strings in BigQuery, such as CONCAT, TRIMMING, etc., along with their syntax.

In the end, we will also discuss the BigQuery Substring function, which helps extract a section of the String in BigQuery and thus helps enhance the performance.

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