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Networking News [2019 Recap]

December 31, 2019

2019 netnews_2

The networking world is ever-changing, with new monitoring and security tools entering the market, companies introducing exciting new technology, partnerships being formed to create disruptive solutions, and more. With so much noteworthy news this year, I thought it would be a good idea to share some of the most important highlights and updates of 2019, and what that could mean for the industry in 2020.

The Cloud Continues to Expand its Reach 

This year there were many initiatives to move from traditional on-premise data centers to the long talked about Cloud. Synergy Research Group recently reported a 37% overall growth year in the public cloud. The most recent contender being the introduction of “Google Bare Metal Solution” that is targeting companies that want to migrate entire stacks of on-prem legacy applications to the cloud. Click here to find out what the move entails and how it can affect future business operations. 

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The Unprecedented Growth of SD-WAN 

Businesses and companies are implementing more cloud usage when storing their data. SD-WAN has become an important system that helps deliver a network infrastructure across various platforms.  It is much more flexible and centralized when directing traffic across the WAN. Additionally, some of the reasons why many businesses are adopting SD-WAN are due to its increased cost savings, auto-failover, redundancy, and simplified management. There are also many untapped markets out there for software providers to find a foothold in the growing and increasingly competitive market. Find out more about SD-WAN here and how to get on that bandwagon.

Multitudes of IoT, 5G and the Edge

With technology being wired into our daily lives through the usage of mass adoption of IoT, there comes a need for how the collected insight is successfully being handled, processed and protected. Coupled with the advent of 5G providing a faster networking speed, the Edge was birthed due to the explosion of the exchange of massive information from all these devices. However, the advent of new technology, can also create other problems. For example, from a security standpoint, data at the edge can be troublesome when it is being handled by different devices that are not secure. As the number of IoT grow, the efforts in making sure that information is safe should be prioritized too. Learn more about the edge here and how it is changing the network. 

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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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