A Network Engineer is charged with maintaining and protecting a network with a high availability requirement. In addition to other defenses, they have chosen to implement a NIPS. How should the NIPS…

Fail-safe in an IPS context typically means fail-closed, which blocks all traffic on failure and directly violates the high-availability requirement.

Fail-smart is not a recognized standard IPS failure mode and therefore cannot be configured as an explicit device behavior.

Fail-closed causes the NIPS to block all traffic upon failure, which maximizes security but directly conflicts with the stated high-availability requirement.

Fail-open means that when the NIPS becomes unavailable, traffic is permitted to pass without inspection rather than being blocked. Because the NIPS sits in front of the firewall - which remains operational - the firewall continues to enforce access controls even during a NIPS failure. This preserves the high-availability requirement while retaining a secondary layer of protection downstream.