We also rely on browsers more than ever. Most applications that we use live in a browser and that will continue to increase. For more and more organizations, a corporate laptop is just a managed web browser machine.
To keep those devices safe, and the data they hold or access, enterprises have started to deploy “browser isolation” services where the browser itself doesn’t run on the machine. Instead, the browser runs on a virtual machine in a cloud provider somewhere. By running away from the device, threats from the browser stay on that virtual machine somewhere in the cloud.
However, most isolation solutions take one of two approaches that both ruin the convenience and flexibility of a web browser:
- Record the isolated browser and send a live stream of it to the user, which is slow and makes it difficult to do basic things like input text to a form.
- Unpack the webpage, inspect it, repack it and send it to the user - sometimes missing threats or more often failing to repack the webpage in a way that it still works.
Today, we’re excited to open up a beta of a third approach to keeping web browsing safe with Cloudflare Browser Isolation. Browser sessions run in sandboxed environments in Cloudflare data centers in 200 cities around the world, bringing the remote browser milliseconds away from the user so it feels like local web browsing.
Instead of streaming pixels to the user, Cloudflare Browser Isolation sends the final output of a browser’s web page rendering. The approach means that the only thing ever sent to the device is a package of draw commands to render the webpage, which also makes Cloudflare Browser Isolation compatible with any HTML5 compliant browser.
