Improving the Availability of Firewalls with a View to Increasing ICT Consumption Due Covid-19

Abstract

Due to pandemic Covid-19, which suddenly forced people to change their habits and stay in their homes for several weeks, the daily routines changed, people could no longer go to work or study, physical contact should be avoided, care with personal hygiene improved and all types of crowding avoided. This causes “home office” work to skyrocket and reach significant peaks. In this way, the demand for services related to Information and Communication Technology, ICT, has grown greatly. To manage the problems caused by the lack of resources needed to transport traffic on the network, SLA (Service Level Agreement) contracts are common, which the parties involved sign (the provider and the customer). Failure to comply with these contracts may result in a fine for the party that has not fulfilled it. This work proposes an approach to improve the dimensioning of Firewalls, in terms of their availability, to establish values as close as possible to the real ones so that there is neither an underestimation nor an overestimation of commitments agreed between the actors. In addition, this work proposes a way to approach this problem in a broader way, taking into account the Dependability, that is, Availability, Reliability and Maintainability.