Remote browser isolation startup WebGap unveils remote browser service to help small businesses from malware and ransomware attacks

With daily news headlines filled with cyber attacks and data breaches, cybersecurity researchers are taking new steps to combat cyber attack. Browser isolation is a new cybersecurity model that physically isolates internet user’s browsing activity away from their local networks and infrastructure. Unlike the traditional browsers where software is installed on user’s machine, browser isolation is delivered to customers or users as a cloud hosted service, in a model known as remote browsing or remote browser isolation (RBI). This model enables organizations to deploy a browser isolation solution to their users without managing the associated server infrastructure. One of the technology startup players in this area is WEBGAP, a provider of remote browser isolation services and the developer of the WEBGAP browser isolation platform.

Today, WEBGAP unveiled its Go remote browser service aimed at small businesses and security conscious individuals. The WEBGAP Go remote browser service is powered by WEBGAP’s proprietary browser isolation engine and is priced at $5 per user, per month, making their remote browser pricing the most cost-effective and competitively priced remote browser service currently on the market. Built on a grid distributed, containerized architecture, WEBGAP is massively scalable and capable of handling millions of simultaneous remote browsing users. Because of its innovative architecture, WEBGAP requires approximately 10x less server infrastructure than competitive virtualization based browser isolation solutions.

Founded in 2018 by co-founders Jun Yang (CTO) and Guise Bule (CEO), the Wyoming-based WEBGAP is a browser isolation cybersecurity startup. Prior to forming WEBGAP, the duo have spent the last decade building browser isolation platforms for the US federal government and are responsible for the world’s first remote browser platform, built for the National Nuclear Security Administration in 2009. WEBGAP’s co-founder Guise Bule is the co-developer of the Safeweb browser isolation cybersecurity model, developed in collaboration with Robin Goldstone at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

WEBGAP Go is a multi-tenant, no-frills, remote browser service for individuals and organizations with smaller amounts of users, who do not require platform customization and provides users with a fully managed and fully hosted remote browser. WEBGAP’s CEO Guise Bule said today, “I am deeply proud to launch our remote browser service. When we started WEBGAP we set out to drive browser isolation solutions into mass market adoption by lowering their price to single digit dollars per user. We set out to protect the many who desperately need the protection, rather than the few with the budget to afford it and the launch of our remote browser service is the first step towards fulfilling that ambition.”

Browser isolation approach also does not rely on filtering content based on known threat patterns or signatures like the traditional web security approaches such as antivirus software and secure web gateways. Rather, it treats all websites and other web content that has not been explicitly whitelisted as untrusted, and isolates them from the local device in a virtual environment such as a container. Technology research firm, Gartner, also identified remote browser (browser isolation) as one of the top technologies for security. The firm forecast that more than 50% of enterprises would actively begin to isolate their internet browsing to reduce the impact of cyber attacks over the coming three years.

WEBGAP’s browser isolation technology is a containerization based (fully containerized) browser isolation technology which requires significantly less infrastructure than competitive solutions. WEBGAP can efficiently scale to accommodate millions of simultaneous users. Their innovative ‘web page run-time rendering’ feature decomposes webpages to strip them of potentially malicious code, before recomposing them into pure HTML for display to the end user, providing a safer internet and isolating users from malware and web based cyberattacks.