High Availability Firewalls | RB

With the risk of productivity loss due to hardware failure, we deploy High Availability (HA) firewalls at our client locations to minimize the impact of such events. With a layer 2 switch managing VLANs for ISP, DMZ and LAN connections from the firewalls, this allows for a seamless failover from one device to the other, in the event of failure.

We had a recent device failure that resulted in the shutdown of the primary firewall; as expected, the secondary firewall became the primary device properly routing all incoming and outgoing traffic. Due to the nature of the primary firewall failure, event notifications were not sent and it was discovered during our routine monitoring the following day. The seamless failover did not affect connectivity and users were unaware of the device failure. A support ticket has been logged with the vendor for this incident. Ultimately, having the HA setup allowed for an entire office to continue operating without any down time.