One of my favorite shows to watch on YouTube is about this couple who sails around the world in their own sailboat. Over the episodes, I’ve noticed various tasks they perform for general upkeep like cleaning the decks and changing out frayed ropes for new ones, but one chore stuck out to me: clearing the hull of barnacles.

It seems like they are constantly having to go ashore to clean these guys off. To my surprise, they accrue on the hull at an alarming rate and reminded me of something with which I work on a daily basis in IT security: reverse proxies.

Like barnacles on the hull, if you don’t take care of your reverse proxies on a regular basis, they will affect the performance of your ship, or in this case, your network security.

It has been my experience that within large enterprises reverse proxies tend to pop up all over the place. Let’s face it, a reverse proxy is a useful tool, particularly when granting secure access for employees to external services, but what happens when they are everywhere? Your tightly knit network starts to look like swiss cheese.

While your network may still technically be secure, it’s likely difficult to manage all those holes — not to mention, the cumulative effect they have on performance. I’ll bet you have more hardware and software running because of the demands your reserve proxies are taxing your systems. Overall, more moving parts increase the likelihood of something breaking.

The good news is that if you deploy a dynamic application tunnel like the SPGateway to solve your SSO and VPN requirements, you also automatically get a reverse proxy. Our solution can be used to consolidate your barnacles, and because the SPGateway is built on NGINX, it’s designed to scale; you’ll never have to worry about proxy accumulation again.

If you’d like to hear more about the SPGateway, click here.