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[Video] Ignite 2016—How We Network TAP IT in Vegas

April 12, 2016

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Not when you give the Garland sales team a camera, though.

Check out our TAP-It at Ignite video and our Facebook photo album to see what we experienced at Palo Alto Networks Ignite 2016. 

Spreading Network TAP Awareness at Ignite 2016 

Palo Alto put together another great Ignite show. This was our second Ignite show and it was great to see familiar faces along with many new people, including NextComputing, Cloud Harmonics, and the Fuel User Group, which Garland Technology is a Founding Partner of.

The show was mostly attended by network engineers, security and architecting professionals from the U.S., although we did see several companies from Canada, Mexico, as well as a small representation from EMEA and APAC.

As we’ve found at many conferences, half the attendees did not know about network TAPs. Those who weren’t aware of the value of network TAPs said they connect their Palo Alto NGFW either directly inline or with SPAN ports. We saw this lack of network TAP awareness as a prime educational opportunity to teach network pros about the best practices of using a network bypass TAP. 

One emerging topic of discussion among Palo Alto trainers was the need to defend the internal network, rather than focusing solely on the external. We used to think only external traffic posed threats; however, in today's high risk environment IT departments needs to protect the internal network as well. Defending the internal network makes visibility even more important, which is where network TAPs can step in and make a difference for IT departments of all sizes.

[Video] TAP'ing It at Ignite

Ignite 2016 with Garland Technology from Garland Technology on Vimeo.

Network TAPs—The Key to Ensuring NGFWs Can Do Their Job

Your Palo Alto NGFW promises a combination of standard enterprise next-gen firewall features, intrusion prevention system (IPS) functionality and application control. However, if the NGFW can’t see every bit, byte and packet® of network traffic, there’s no way to ensure it is defending your network to its fullest potential. With network TAPs, you can ensure your security appliances and applications have 100% visibility while gaining access for updates, maintenance and trouble-shooting without taking the link down.

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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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