Five policies for enhancing network Elasticity

Cyber resilience, also known as operational resilience, is the ability of the network to quickly recover and continue running in the event of a disaster. Disaster events are widely used, such as long-term power outages, network equipment failures, malicious intrusion, and accidental coffers on servers. When we are dealing with operational variables that may cause system and company business to crash and are completely unknown, network elasticity can ensure the normal operation of the network.

Network Firewall is an important area for network elasticity. The following five strategies can help us survive major crises that may cause the overall operation crash.

1. Active-active Clusters

Ensuring the continuous availability of Headquarters sites and VPN connections is an important condition for ensuring business continuity. This high availability policy includes the concept of Dual-active clusters. Active-active clusters are activated on all nodes, so they can quickly take over the load when other nodes fail. The use of active-active clusters ensures flexible website protection, which is equivalent to using multiple active nodes in each cluster. In addition, it allows us to upgrade and downgrade code and update software at any time while continuously enabling connections. This O & M mode can optimize the total throughput of the firewall, so that we can use only one firewall to cope with serious fault events.

2. stateful failover

When the system suffers traffic interruption or arbitrary interference, the customer's dissatisfaction and increased possibility of problems also emerge. Stateful failover can avoid both cases. This policy records the Sessions of the primary device on a backup device, and then the backup device will immediately switch in when the primary device goes down. The session will not be interrupted at all, and the customer will not feel the impact, nor will there be any connection loss or problems under control. Stateful failover is a necessary condition for implementing node or link failover, and plays an important role in the software upgrade process with extremely demanding time requirements.

3. Multiple interconnection links

If there is only one Internet connection link, the link interruption will generate a single point of failure. The cost of connecting to multiple Internet links in a firewall is less than that of leased lines or Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS). In addition, when one or more network connections are interrupted, the high availability of the Internet can still be guaranteed. Multiple links should span across multiple ISPs or locations. load should be applied remotely between links, and hybrid connection methods should be supported, including asymmetric digital subscription lines, mobile devices, MPLS networks, and IP addresses.

4. High Availability of management systems

Elastic network policies need to protect the management capability, which can be achieved through the high availability of the management system. Ensure that the firewall of the management system allows administrators to maintain constant and no-delay network control over configuration views and configuration changes, and to better monitor the status and respond to events flexibly. The network security element remains accessible and manageable, so even if the management server goes down, we will not lose any configuration data. Another benefit is that it not only protects the Management Server and ensures its secure access, but also protects the log server and ensures that the Network Time Protocol is consistent during the event investigation process.

5. Server Load balancer

Load Balancing means that the service will not be interrupted because the Web server cannot process the incoming requests due to heavy load-including requests sent by machines or programs. By deploying a firewall with built-in Server Load balancer, We can automatically distribute the load to two or more servers. In this way, key business services can be kept available, and O & M costs are kept at a low level, so you do not need to separately purchase a third-party server Load balancer solution.