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Philip Merry , Software Engineer ,
SIOS Technology infrastructure storage to storage attached to the secondary infrastructure . This ensures that an identical copy of your critical data and applications is already present on the secondary infrastructure if that infrastructure is suddenly called into service .
Also , the HA solution constantly monitors the primary infrastructure so that , should the primary infrastructure suddenly appear to go dark , the HA solution can instantly trigger an orchestrated failover to the secondary infrastructure .
Your antivirus solution , however , may interpret the HA solution ’ s effort to restart a queue or clear memory as an attack . It may then quarantine critical components of the HA solution , thereby rendering it unable to trigger an orchestrated failover if one becomes necessary . Moreover , if your antivirus system does this silently , you may not know that your HA solution is compromised until your production system does go dark and that production system does not fail over to your secondary infrastructure ( at which point access to your critical applications is put on hold for an indeterminate period of time ).
Similar challenges arise in configuring the firewalls and access control lists protecting your critical applications . Your IT organization is going to want to close as many ports as can be closed and ensure that the bare minimum number of people and systems can gain root or even low-level access to your critical applications . At the same time , different components of an HA solution are going to need low-level access to your critical applications and databases to ensure ongoing access to those applications and databases .
Because there are already complete copies of your critical applications and databases on that secondary infrastructure , you can continue to run your applications with minimal interruption and your personnel or customers can continue to interact with these business-critical resources .
As you might imagine , your security systems are going to take notice of any HA solution that tries monitor , stop or start activities on your critical infrastructure . Unless your IT teams understand what your HA solution is doing and what your security systems are doing , one or the other is not going to work as effectively as you expect it to . That can leave you vulnerable to the very problems that both your HA and security solutions are designed to prevent .
The interplay of HA and security solutions
Consider the interplay of antivirus and HA solutions . Some HA solutions monitor a wide range of activities taking place on the active infrastructure , and they are powerful enough to detect and resolve a variety of lowlevel problems that could , if left unattended , grow into bigger problems that eventually trigger a failover to the secondary infrastructure . If the HA solution detects a stalled queue or a memory fault , for example , and has the ability to resolve that proactively , the HA solution can help deliver uninterrupted access to your critical applications and databases without even having to perform a full failover .
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