Flexible, Fail-Safe Inline Security Boosts Agility, Availability, and Resilience While Reducing Network Costs

As networks deliver more services and carry ever-higher volumes of multiprotocol traffic, data rates continue to soar. Voice, data, and streaming video now travel on one wire, raising security and compliance issues. Today’s intense threat landscape demands multiple proactive security systems throughout the network for a strong, layered security posture. These proactive devices include firewalls, next-gen firewalls, web-application firewalls, and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS)—and all require inline network deployment.

Multiple inline security resources can themselves actually become points of failure and vulnerability. They bring concerns about network uptime, performance, operational ownership, security flexibility and overall costs. Despite redundancy and other protections, they must be taken offline for upgrades and scheduled or unscheduled maintenance. Further, if a tool loses power or becomes overprovisioned, the network link can break and traffic cease to flow.

An Inline Security Framework offers a proven solution for deploying multiple inline security tools. This smart approach improves your network’s availability, agility, performance, and functionality, while providing greater security, flexibility, and resilience, and lowering overall costs and personnel workloads.

An Inline Security Framework protects your network uptime with multiple resources: Bypass switch bi-directional heartbeat monitoring for system, link and power failures ensures uninterrupted network uptime while increasing network availability. Security tool load balancing ensures efficiency while enabling you to leverage existing tool investments and add capacity as needed, rather than investing in a forklift upgrade.

Replacing multiple inline security devices with a single passive bypass switch eliminates network maintenance downtime while providing a pay-as-you-go capacity upgrade path for your changing security needs—dramatically reducing costs of migrating your 1G tools to the 10G environment, for example.

Bypass Switches offer proven, fail-safe Inline protection for your security and monitoring tools. A heartbeat packet protects the network link from application, link, and power failure: if a packet doesn’t return, the switch instantly goes into bypass mode and takes that appliance out of the traffic path. With support for 10Mbps to 40Gbps connectivity, you receive automated failover protection on full duplex traffic streams connected to the monitoring tools. Because the Bypass Switch is passive, link traffic continues to flow even if the Bypass itself loses power.

Packet Brokers reside behind the bypass switch to provide additional flexibility and control over traffic flow for inline security tools. These packet brokers provide advanced control of traffic as it traverses the security tools, including load balancing, traffic aggregation from multiple links, application filtering, and out-of-band access.

Ixia’s robust Inline Security Solutions give you the confidence of assured inline availability for improved business continuity and network health.