Browser Isolation

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What Does Browser Isolation Mean?

Browser isolation is a cutting-edge idea in cybersecurity that consists of maintaining browser operations away from a bare-metal environment or intermediate server hardware system, in order to provide barriers against malware, viruses and other threats. With browser isolation, the user's browser session is abstracted away from direct internet access – that allows all sorts of harmful activity to be trapped at an exterior level, and never penetrate the inside of a local area network or other network atmosphere.

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Techopedia Explains Browser Isolation

Browser isolation was developed in 2009, and has been pioneered in a military cybersecurity environment. Some cybersecurity experts refer to a similar concept as the “airgap” model, in which a secure network is physically isolated from an unsecured network. For example, this type of process is often used in nuclear facilities and other mission-critical military or government systems.

Many modern browser isolation services utilize cloud hosting in order to isolate the browser session from the hardware. Interestingly, many of them also use containerization, where a digital virtualized container operates individually with the client operating system, and the browser activity is placed inside the container to isolate it from other parts of the network.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.