Web Filtering Moves to the Cloud

For those of you spending your workdays posting videos of the cat to YouTube or trading messages with friends on Facebook, you’d better start cultivating another pastime.

Web filtering software is moving to the cloud — that all-knowing, pervasive, sometimes unreliable cluster of computers in the digital ether — and it’s going to watch your every move online and tattle to your boss.

Zscaler, a Santa Clara start-up created by serial security entrepreneur Jay Chaudhry, is publicly unveiling itself Monday. Over the last decade, Mr. Chaudhry has founded such companies as AirDefense (sold to Motorola), CipherTrust (sold to Secure Computing), SecureIt (sold to VeriSign) and CoreHarbor (sold to USinterworking.) That makes him kind of like the Brett Favre of security entrepreneurs –- he keeps coming back.

Zscaler’s idea is to relieve companies of the tiresome and costly burden of managing Web filtering and security on their own servers. Instead, the cloud-based service, which is rented to companies by the month, acts like a Web proxy, intercepting all incoming and outbound HTTP traffic from employees and scrubbing it for malware and online activity that violates company policy.

Full story in the NYT