What Are Proxies and How Do They Fuel Business Growth?

Proxies are widely used for personal data protection and unrestricted internet access worldwide. But they also help businesses do market research and verify ads. Let's see how.

The introduction of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act in 2023 shows India's movement towards online personal data protection. Similar to European GDPR, it encourages safe collection, processing, and storing of personally sensitive data.

Proxy servers are often used to manage online data flows. Like VPNs, they provide an additional layer of online privacy. However, proxies have a broader application scope and can fuel business growth. India's MSMEs can benefit from proxies twice: by protecting the user data and maintaining unrestricted information access worldwide.

Naturally, some MSMEs are not familiar with proxy technology and its deployment. Understanding how proxy servers work and the different proxy types can be your key to business longevity.

What Are Proxy Servers?

A proxy server can be any device that handles online communication instead of the original user. Imagine it as a mail carrier. Instead of delivering the mail yourself, you give it to a dedicated person who does the job and protects the letter's confidentiality at the same time.

Whenever you connect to a proxy server, your device sends all online data through it first. The proxy then forwards it to the destination, like browsing a geographically restricted website. For example, you can use a Japan proxy to watch exclusive Netflix content from India or the US, so the use cases are various.

The trick is that by connecting to a proxy server in another region, it assigns you a local Internet Protocol address, or IP address in short. An IP is like your device's home address on the internet. So, if you use an IP address from a different country, you can browse the internet as if you were there.

As you will shortly see, the worldwide proxy server network benefits India's MSMEs in many ways. But before that, let's take a closer look at different proxy types.

Proxy Types: Which Is Best for MSMEs?

Proxies can be divided into two large categories: forward and reverse proxy servers. Forward proxies accept traffic from the user's device and route it over the internet. Meanwhile, reverse proxies protect backend servers and optimize incoming data flow to save their resources.

Let's concentrate on forward proxies as they are most widely used for business growth. Here are four forward proxy types you will encounter most often.

1. Residential proxies use a genuine person's device, making the traffic nearly indistinguishable for a genuine user. Offers a high online anonymity level.

2. Datacenter proxies offer great performance with high uptime, but also have a low online anonymity level.

3. Mobile proxies are similar to residential ones, but use a genuine person's mobile device.

4. ISP proxies provide an unchanging IP address from a different Internet Service Provider, which is beneficial for social media marketing.

These proxies often provide additional benefits, like IP address rotation for online data gathering or state and city-level targeting for localized marketing campaigns. Here's how they can help your business grow.

Proxies for MSMEs Growth

Proxy type variety results in multiple use cases, so pick one according to your exact needs. Here's a list of the most common business proxy use cases with proxy type recommendations.

Business Intelligence Gathering

Also called web scraping, it's an automated process of gathering publicly available web data from multiple sources. For example, you can scrape user reviews to know what people say about your services and products online. Instead of checking them manually, which is time-consuming, a good scraper collects user reviews almost in real-time and makes them ready for further data analysis. Residential proxies are the best option for web scraping.

Ad Verification

Whenever you order ads, they must reach the intended audience, but how do you know the ad agency is giving it enough time to convert? You can connect to proxies in different countries to see how the ads look from a consumer perspective. You can then verify whether your ads perform the way they should. Affordable datacenter proxies should suffice for ad verification.

Multiple Account Management

Successful social media campaigns require multiple accounts, but popular social networks often limit their number per user. You can assign a separate proxy IP address to each social media account. This way, social networks consider them to belong to different users, and you can reach more potential buyers. ISP proxies with a static IP address are best in this case.

Final Thoughts

There are more use cases, like business data protection, market research, and price comparison. When you master proxies, you will be able to collect data from the most challenging sources worldwide and manage dozens of accounts to enhance digital marketing. Be sure to pick a proxy service provider that offers the required proxy type and ample servers globally so that you don't run into any shortages.