Introduction
The Internet has become much more integral in our day-to-day lives, as the need for constant, reliable internet connectivity has evolved to utility status. Businesses such as retail, healthcare, banking and investment lose revenue and productivity with even a few minutes of network downtime. Today, businesses can utilize a network bypass switch as part of their network infrastructure to maximize network uptime.
Bypass Switch Application
Network security tools are appliances that are located in the path of the main network link. All network traffic will pass through the appliance. These networkmonitoring tools provide functionality and services in the areas of security, monitoring, traffic policing, and content inspection. Such security tools are typically known as intrusion prevention systems (IPS), data loss prevention (DLP) and deep packet inspection (DPI). Inline network monitoring tools are single points of failure in computer networks, which means that if the appliance loses power, experiences system hang-ups or software failure, or is removed from the network, traffic cannot flow through the network link. The network bypass switch eliminates this point of failure by automatically bypassing traffic around the network appliance whenever the appliance is incapable of processing or passing the traffic.
Monitoring Tool Chaining
IT teams managing multiple security solutions need an easy way to connect all of their inline and out-of-band tools, so they can effectively keep the network up and running but secure at the same time.
Chaining allows you to pass traffic through multiple inline tools monitoring the same network link, while being able to independently monitor the health of each inline tool with bypass heartbeats. In the case of failed heartbeats, you can manually or automatically move your inline device out-of-band to manage, update or optimize.
Inline tool chaining provides the flexibility to easily take tools out-of-band for updates, installing patches, maintenance or troubleshooting to optimize and validate before pushing back inline.
Conclusion
In summary, deploying bypass switches allows your network and security tools to support and protect your business while minimizing network disruptions. Moreover, bypass switches allow multiple security tools to process traffic from a single network link and provide many valuable capabilities like pre-configured heartbeats, and support tool redundancy.
