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Is Network Downtime & Failure Costing You $50,000 Per Hour?

November 19, 2014

Even the most robust networks managed by expert IT professionals experience downtime. The network security appliances you’ve spent thousands of dollars purchasing and countless hours implementing are worth nothing if you experience network downtime that renders them unable to do their jobs. That said, strategically managing those risks makes a significant difference – and saves you plenty of money. 

The True Cost Of Network Downtime

When businesses analyze the cost of projects or potential risks, it’s easy to have some level of tunnel vision and omit certain expenses. Calculating the cost of a network failure or outage is no different.

There are a number of depictions of the unthinkable costs incurred by these issues, and some of the most staggering are listed below:

Business Disruption – $179,827
Lost Revenue – $118,080
End-User Productivity Loss – $96,226
IT Productivity Loss – $42,530
Detection – $22,347

3 Historic Examples Of Network Downtime

Considering the potential cost of just one hour of downtime, those companies that have experienced massive outages have paid a hefty price. The following are the three longest instances of network downtime:

3. Intuit – 2 days (and in some cases, 5)
A change in Intuit’s network configuration unintentionally blocked customer access to several Intuit services.
 
2. Amazon – 4 days
Another network configuration change involving a subset of the Amazon Elastic Block Store made certain services inoperable

1. Bank of America – 6 days
Attributed to a number of technical issues, including greater Web traffic than expected and a project to upgrade its platform, online banking suffered significant slowdown and outages.

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Heartbeats Packets Inside the Bypass TAP

If the inline security tool goes off-line, the TAP will bypass the tool and automatically keep the link flowing. The Bypass TAP does this by sending heartbeat packets to the inline security tool. As long as the inline security tool is on-line, the heartbeat packets will be returned to the TAP, and the link traffic will continue to flow through the inline security tool.

If the heartbeat packets are not returned to the TAP (indicating that the inline security tool has gone off-line), the TAP will automatically 'bypass' the inline security tool and keep the link traffic flowing. The TAP also removes the heartbeat packets before sending the network traffic back onto the critical link.

While the TAP is in bypass mode, it continues to send heartbeat packets out to the inline security tool so that once the tool is back on-line, it will begin returning the heartbeat packets back to the TAP indicating that the tool is ready to go back to work. The TAP will then direct the network traffic back through the inline security tool along with the heartbeat packets placing the tool back inline.

Some of you may have noticed a flaw in the logic behind this solution!  You say, “What if the TAP should fail because it is also in-line? Then the link will also fail!” The TAP would now be considered a point of failure. That is a good catch – but in our blog on Bypass vs. Failsafe, I explained that if a TAP were to fail or lose power, it must provide failsafe protection to the link it is attached to. So our network TAP will go into Failsafe mode keeping the link flowing.

Glossary

  1. Single point of failure: a risk to an IT network if one part of the system brings down a larger part of the entire system.

  2. Heartbeat packet: a soft detection technology that monitors the health of inline appliances. Read the heartbeat packet blog here.

  3. Critical link: the connection between two or more network devices or appliances that if the connection fails then the network is disrupted.

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