Given that uptime or service availability is the most critical factor for service measurement, most service providers configure shared hardware in a high-availability configuration; in most cases the setup is an active-standby configuration. This should be your service provider's standard. If the shared-hardware application is not in HA configuration, it may be too risky for your environment.

In addition to all the hardware considerations, there are factors that you must consider when choosing security software to protect your network. In the next column, I will go over the software considerations to ensure your IT infrastructure is well protected.

Jian Zhen, CISM, CISSP, is the director of product marketing at LogLogic, a log management and intelligence firm in Sunnyvale, Calif. He has been in the information security industry for 10 years. He can be reached at zhenjl@gmail.com or his blog at Operational Intelligence.