Introduction

Asia Pacific is in the midst of a cybersecurity reckoning following a spate of major data breaches including Qantas and Louis Vuitton in Australia, attacks on Singapore’s critical infrastructure, a surge of ransomware threats in India, and most recently a successful attack on Google. While most organizations are focused on enhancing cybersecurity, one of the most overlooked weaknesses is the trade-off between inline protection and network uptime.

In the burgeoning age of AI, organizations can no longer rely on traditional cybersecurity approaches to fully protect them from cyberattack. Modern defence must now start with full network visibility. Yet many organizations still struggle to secure encrypted traffic, update tools without disruption, or test new security solutions in live environments – all of which can open the door to advanced threats.

You Can’t Trust What You Can’t See

A growing concern for organizations is that, within a few short years, AI has gone from a novel consumer tool to transforming key financial and government platforms. AI is now responsible for making critical decisions every second. But there’s a blind spot where too much trust is placed in AI without full visibility of what’s happening on the network.

The reality for organizations is that, if you can’t see it, you can’t secure it, and your AI can become a security liability. Trust in AI starts with visibility, integrity, and control at the packet level.

This is why network test access points (TAPs) and hardware data diodes are no longer optional. They’re foundational to modern IT infrastructure and are rapidly emerging as silent guardians of organisational data.

TAPs provide 100% visibility of network traffic by copying data at the packet level. This enables security tools and AI systems to automatically analyse unaltered traffic, free of blind spots or sampling issues. TAPs ensures that what the AI “sees” is exactly what is happening, with no room for misinterpretation or manipulation.

At the same time, hardware data diodes enforce unidirectional data flow, ensuring that information flows from sensitive environments such as operational technology (OT) systems, critical infrastructure, or air-gapped systems without the possibility of inbound threats. This one-way communication provides a solid safeguard on the AI’s data sources and preserves the integrity of secure zones, especially for high risk industries such as defence, health and finance.

Maintaining Uptime of Security Tools Is Crucial

Many organizations still face the recurring dilemma of how to update, test, or maintain inline security tools without taking them offline and risking exposure. This operational challenge creates dangerous windows of vulnerability, especially as attackers grow more sophisticated and faster at exploiting gaps.

To close the gap, IT leaders are turning to solutions that can keep networks both secure and continuously available. Garland Technology’s EdgeSafe™ and EdgeLens® bypass solutions offer a compelling answer. Designed to ensure full traffic visibility while minimising disruption, these tools enable administrators to conduct maintenance or insert new security capabilities without compromising network integrity or performance.

EdgeSafe’s bypass TAPs use heartbeat monitoring to check the availability of inline tools and bypass them if offline without causing network downtime. EdgeLens goes a step further, combining a bypass TAP with network packet broker functionality to support inline and out-of-band traffic simultaneously, allowing for forensic lookback, high availability, and tool chaining.

In an era where trust in AI and digital operations hinges on the reliability of network infrastructure, bypass solutions are becoming a business essential. Because ultimately, if you can’t see your network and protect it during change you can’t secure it.