Network administrators for businesses large and small have an increasingly harder job. From making sure all the employees’ devices meshes well with the network to cloud based applications such as Office 365, while keeping everything safe and secure. As more services requires connections to the net, that brings a wider vector for malicious actors to attack with ever more sophisticated tools.

A wealth of security options have evolved with the constantly changing landscape of cybersecurity threats. A network appliance acting as the basis to host a full suite of security appliances is becoming an attractive options to augment or replace the legacy networking devices to mitigate the new generation of attacks. These appliances may include New Generation Firewall (NGFW), Deep Pack Inspection (DPI), Intrusion Detection System (IDS), Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), and more.

Consolidating all the security tools can ease the burden of administering differing hardware. Newest software solutions allows the network administrator to access and manage all these advanced functions through a single interface. This allows the real time generation of meaningful reporting on active situations, allowing the administrator to take proactive approach for containment. Also leaving detailed report, allowing the tracing of incidents to understand the severity and if data were compromised. This will facilitate to keep the business’ lifeline to the internet open, ensuring business continuity and minimal disturbance during security incidents.

Hardware solution also have special needs to keep the network up and running efficiently. Server class components to ensure the highest reliability, and smart implementations such as by-pass function, to allow packets to flow through on to a redundant system in the case of failure or compromised system. Additional thoughts have been put into how to process and move network packets effectively. Moving network from 1 GbE up to 100 GbE brings a tremendous amount of traffic that needs to be processed. New NICs and additional accelerators can be used to offload compute intensive tasks from the CPU, reducing the bottlenecks in the system. Advanced PCIe fabrics design brings flexibility of Ethernet ports configuration and system performance. Implementing DPDK framework is also important, bypassing interrupt based kernel space driver with polling mode user space process, to achieve low overhead packets transmission and higher throughput.