Why Might Companies Want to Hide Their IPs?
You wouldn’t walk through the streets shouting your home address at random strangers passing by, would you? While most people would simply ignore you, some burglars could use the information against you, putting your safety at risk.
So, why are you doing the online equivalent of shouting your home address at strangers by sharing your IP with every site you visit?
The IP – or Internet Protocol – address is a unique identifier of a device connected to a computer network. It’s not just a random string of numbers but a numerical label used for location addressing and network interface identification.
Your IP holds an abundance of information on you and your online habits and activities. Sharing it with others can easily expose your private information – a risk especially relevant to companies handling large pools of sensitive client information.
If you want to overcome this risk, enhance your safety, and ensure your privacy, you need to learn how to hide an IP address without slowing down your processes.
Why hide your IP?
Every single device connected to the internet has an IP address. Without it, it wouldn’t be possible to look up information online and receive your search results.
In a nutshell, an IP works similarly to a physical home address. For instance, when you order a pizza, the delivery person needs to know your home address if they are to deliver it to you and not to your neighbor down the street.
In such a fashion, when you access a website and make an information request, such as “sneakers on sale”, the website needs to know where to send its response and present the page for “sneakers on sale”. For that purpose, it uses your IP address.
However, the IP doesn’t solely contain the virtual “delivery address” information. Considering that it’s tied to a specific Internet Service Provider in a particular region, it can tell the site or any onlooker your actual physical location.
Additionally, the IP can be used in combination with the cookies on your device to uncover more sensitive information about you – your online habits, the sites you visit, how long you stay on them, your browsing history, cloud files you open, and more. Therefore, hiding your IP might be critical if you want to protect your online privacy.
Benefits of protecting the company’s IP
Though learning how to hide an IP address is important for any online user concerned about their privacy, it’s critical for companies that want to protect sensitive information, conduct thorough market research, and bypass obstacles and censorships.
Some of the main benefits of protecting your company’s IP are as follows.
Improve online security
Hiding your IP can help you protect yourself from any third parties that might be monitoring your and your employees’ online activity. However, more importantly, it can help you avoid the risks of a DDoS attack and IP address spoofing.
Protect remote workers
Though offering remote job opportunities certainly brings some benefits to a company – minimizing expenses, expanding the talent pool, and offering more flexibility – it also brings risks.
Remote workers connecting to unsecured networks could accidentally expose sensitive company information and leak data.
Hiding the remote workers’ IP addresses can offer an added layer of protection that keeps the company’s data away from prying eyes.
Conduct competitor research
Just like hackers and websites can gleam into your IP address, so can your competitors. If you are visiting their websites for price research, monitoring, and gathering insights, they will quickly notice, which could prompt them to block your IP.
Hiding your IP address while researching your competitors can help you avoid this.
Bypass restrictions
Finally, hiding your IP could help you bypass restrictions and internet censorship.
Much of the content available online isn’t available to all. Many websites will impose geo-restrictions that prevent access to users from specific geographical locations. Alternatively, they will present different types of content to users from different regions. Both of these can prevent you from conducting proper market, audience, and competitor research.
The simple solution is hiding your IP address and unlocking access to the content you need.
How to hide an IP address
If you want to hide your IP address and browse the web anonymously, you have two options – using either proxies or VPNs.
The services are somewhat similar, both acting as middlemen between your device and the internet and helping ensure your privacy and security.
Proxies vs. VPNs
Proxies are remote servers that sit between your device and the rest of the internet. They route your traffic, stopping your device from directly communicating with the sites you want to visit. They protect your IP address, often providing you with a fake new one that helps keep you protected.
Proxies are commonly used for:
• Ensuring online anonymity;
• Increasing the browsing speed;
• Rotating IP addresses;
• Filtering out malicious content;
• Bypassing geo-restrictions.
VPNs, Virtual Private Networks are also servers that sit between your device and the rest of the web. However, their primary purpose is to protect you from monitoring. VPNs encrypt your connection to any network, keeping it hidden from the sites you’re visiting and your government and ISP. In the process, they also hide your IP.
The only problem is that the VPN’s encryption affects your browsing speed, causing a significant delay in your traffic. Though they are effective at protecting your IP address, they could slow down your processes, making proxies a better choice in most instances.
Conclusion
Though the average user has no real need to hide their IP other than to improve their privacy, companies find it necessary. Hiding your company’s IP helps you improve security, protect remote workers, conduct seamless competitor research, bypass restrictions, and more. With the help of a proxy or even a VPN, in some instances, you can protect your company’s IP and access the web without obstacles.
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