TAP into Technology | Garland Technology Blog

The Cost of Network Outages

Written by Chris Bihary | 8/11/16 12:00 PM

“Network outages can cost financial institutes up to $60k for 30 minutes of downtime.”

I was just speaking to a long time customer of ours that divulged this to me when discussing their upcoming network connectivity needs. As a financial institution their network details are confidential, but the scenario is a common one that I was approved to share with you.

The customer was explaining to me that the cost of a bypass TAP is insignificant when compared to the prospect of network downtime that results in thousands of dollars per minute. Actually here’s an exact quote:

In our case, the potential for downtime is not an option, so any in-line tool is deployed with an external bypass switch, and that has nearly eliminated outages due to security infrastructure hardware failures.”

Read more about this financial services problem resolution process.

Bypass Days of Network Trouble Shooting

“We had a situation where our SSL and SSH were not working. Nor was Port 80 or Port 443. It was a nightmare and after literally spending days looking into the issue we brought in an expert. With a bypass TAP the expert was able to bypass the DDoS and then the IPS. The magic started when we bypassed the IPS and everything started working properly again.”

Once they used the bypass mode to determine where the problem was in the network, they were able to quickly resolve the issue. The company now also has a new problem resolution process, that includes:

  1. Verify Routing
  2. Verify DNS
  3. Layer 2 troubleshooting: Bypass IPS > DDoS > SSL to identify problem

For sometime now, bypass TAPs have been part of this customer’s network architecture.

The main reason, “Because the cost of network outages make the cost of a simple bypass tap insignificant. To reduce our network downtime by even 5 seconds authorizes me to deploy bypass TAPs for all of our in-line security tools."

To learn more about how bypass TAPs can reduce your network downtime and increase the lifecycle of your in-line appliances, contact me or a member of our network design team.