One major over looked security best practice - High Availability of Networks

Posted by undefined Saif Khan on 2025 Jan 31st

Businesses operate security in their environments to achieve protection from cyber threats and attacks.

A cyber attack can target an environment such that its unable to perform is function, that it, support IT services for the business and keep them available for its end customer or users.

In addition, to cyber attack, a physical hardware failure can result in loss business services from operating. This is where Network High Availability helps keeps the business running smooth even in a hardware failure scenario.

What is Network high availability?

High Available Networks achieve resilience by providing redundancy in the traffic flow. To achieve network devices are deployed with redundant operation.

Once such High Available deployment scenario is show here;

High

As shown here, the 2 firewalls are connected in dual deployment configuration. If the Primary active firewall fails, the Auxiliary/standby firewall automatically take over and start passing traffic. Due this dual/redundant setup the business users do not feel and loss of services or operations.

Also, the business IT support teams don't need to get into panic mode and can resolve the failed hardware issue in a normal way.

Summary:

Our recommendation is that when every a business is looking to purchase firewalls, LAN switches or Access Points, they should keep in High Availability design concept to help keep their business running smoothly.