We know that In-Line (“Active”) network tools have become an essential part of any network. These appliances protect your network from various vulnerabilities, give you network visibility, and grant you access to a slew of services:

• Intrusion Detection Systems
• Intrusion Prevention Systems
• Next-Generation Firewalls
• Bandwidth Management
• Content Filtering
• Data Leakage Prevention

Vendors offer these services with active hardware/software packages that pick up your data and sift through it to find what they are programmed to find – and that is fantastic. What isn’t fantastic is that they add Points of Failure to your network if you install them as-is.

Last week, we touched briefly on what a network TAP is, and you saw how it doesn’t change or interrupt data – it just “copies” it, so to speak, giving you complete network visibility. Well, now we are taking that education and applying it! Specifically, we are exploring Bypass mode network TAPs – very powerful little pieces of hardware.

In-line appliances are active and installed directly between two network devices. This requires you to use a Bypass TAP that sends all of the network traffic through your In-Line Appliance. In addition to directing your traffic through the appliance, the Bypass TAP inserts a heartbeat into the in-line appliance – “sensing” the health of your monitoring tool. A note about this heartbeat – it is never inserted into the network; it is only present between the TAP and monitoring appliance.

Now, what happens if the appliance loses power, needs maintenance, or the heartbeat is lost?

This is the genius behind this device. It really is simple – if the appliance goes down or has to be updated, you can either stop the Bypass TAP from directing traffic to the device or it will do so automatically if it no longer senses a heartbeat. In either scenario, the bypass TAP keeps the network live, which would not have been the case had the appliance been placed directly in-line without the TAP. No more waiting for critical updates because it would disrupt your network visibility. No more network outages because an appliance went down. Once you are ready to include your device again, or the heartbeat is back in place, the TAP can begin directing traffic again.

Some manufacturers build a TAP or Bypass into their appliances – but companies that would want to totally remove the point of failure from the application realize that an external TAP is the clear winner here.

Learn more about the network TAP and how it improves your network management.