The Practice of Network Security: Deployment Strategies for Production Environments

4.4. Redundancy

Even the best networking equipment can fail. This is an unfortunate fact of life, and something of which most network administrators are probably painfully aware. Having a router at the edge of the network fail can create endless headaches for administrators, and employees within your organization.

Recall from Chapter 2 one of the key tenets of a good security policy is availability. It is important that the core and the edge of the network be available as close to 100 percent of the time as possible. One way to help ensure a high level of network availability is by having redundant connections to the Internet. Of course it is not enough to have redundant connections; the connections should be to different providers, and terminate ...