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Application Ecosystem

Enterprises stitching together multiple security appliances inherit policy drift, inspection blind spots, and operational overhead; effective Layer-7 enforcement therefore demands a single, modular system that integrates cleanly, scales horizontally, and sustains line-rate performance.

Typical High-Level Solution Architecture​

SafeSquid’s Application Ecosystem meets this need through an enterprise-grade, cloud-integrated platform; it unifies policy decisions, combines intelligent threat detection with deep content inspection, and supports seamless multi-cloud deployment.

  • Elastic scale: Clustered proxies grow horizontally without policy drift.
  • Unified L7 control: Central policy engine delivers consistent outcomes
  • Audit-ready operations: Built-in reporting/forensics and versioned backups
  • Secure by design: Selective TLS interception, true-MIME validation, and policy-aware DNS to expose intent and block abuse.

Architectural Planes​

Enterprises struggle when a single change in one place breaks traffic in another, or when policy behaves differently across sites. SafeSquid splits responsibilities into planes so each solves a distinct problem without colliding with the others, simplifying scale, upgrades, and audit.

  • Data plane
    Modern HTTPS hides intent while users expect instant page loads. Blind pass-through misses attacks; heavy inspection adds latency. The SafeSquid Proxy Cluster sits in the path and resolves this tension: it validates TLS, decrypts selectively under policy, inspects HTTP semantics, scans the content exchanged, and enforces security policies. Nodes remain stateless and scale horizontally behind load balancers.

  • Control plane
    The problem is sprawl: dozens of proxies, each with slightly different rules, and risky “all-or-nothing” pushes. The Policy Configuration Console becomes the source of truth. Teams author, simulate, review, and approve changes, then publish with staged rollouts and RBAC. Versioning and diffs make every change auditable and reversible, so updates move quickly without surprises in the data path.

  • Management plane
    Licenses, activation keys, and certificate lifecycles scatter across tools and tickets, slowing operators and creating outages. The Self-Service Portal centralises these jobs: activate or renew licenses, manage the enterprise root CA and OCSP/CRL settings, enrol connectors, and adjust organisation settings. Role-scoped access and activity history keep routine administration fast and accountable.

  • Observability plane
    Incident response and compliance fail when logs lack context or arrive late. Reporting & Forensics solves this by streaming structured telemetry (JSON/CEF/syslog) with evidence fields. Dashboards show health and policy outcomes in real time, while scheduled CSV/PDF reports satisfy audit cycles without manual exports.

Core Components​

At a high level, the SafeSquid SWG solution consists of the following core components:

  1. SafeSquid Proxy Cluster
    Central enforcement point for all HTTP/HTTPS traffic, performing full proxying, in-line inspection, and enforcement of security policies.

  2. Policy Management Console
    Administrative interface for defining, simulating, and enforcing access control, URL filtering, SSL inspection, DLP, and other security policies.

  3. Self-Service Portal
    Web portal for managing cloud-integrated features, like creating activation keys, license management, configuring Root CA certificates, etc.

  4. Reporting & Forensics
    Real-time dashboards, customizable reports and forensic logging for visibility, compliance, and incident investigation.

  5. Integrated DNS Security
    Hardened internal DNS resolver with policy-aware resolution, blocking of malicious domains, and mitigation of DNS tunneling and spoofing attacks.

  6. Cloud-Based Configuration Backup & Restore
    Cloud-synchronized backup system with version-controlled policy snapshots for seamless restoration and rollback in case of failure or misconfiguration.

  7. Cloud-Based Threat Intelligence Feeds
    To ensure your organisation’s security posture has maximum relevance, real-time intelligence feeds are directly injected into the enforcement pipeline.

Supporting Services​

For production use, deploy SafeSquid with Supporting Services for high availability, monitoring and performance enhancement.

  1. Monit
    Monitoring service to ensure zero downtime and optimal performance: continually optimises the system, cleans up temporary files, auto-restarts in case of unexpected shutdowns, and fetches threat intelligence updates.

  2. Bind
    Speeds up the DNS resolutions by utilising Root DNS servers

  3. NTP
    Time synchronizations with the Active directory in SSO configuration

Integrations​

With Enterprise-Ready Integrations, SafeSquid can easily integrate with your IAM systems, ICAP servers, DLP systems, SIEMs, and SoC threat intelligence, to easily blend in your environment.

Directory Structure​

SafeSquid’s directory structure adheres to the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and logically organizes files related to service initialization, log management, module loading, UI rendering, and system performance tuning. It separates critical components such as SSL certificates, content filtering modules, DLP, caching, and analytics, ensuring easy maintenance, debugging, and extensibility.