Catching a Silent Firewall Failure
Before It Could Threaten Trial Data.
How NetBrain's Golden Assessment Library and Check Point Summary Dashboard protect the network behind FDA clinical trials.
A Leading Clinical Trial Technology Company · Life Sciences · Global
This customer runs the technology behind the world's FDA clinical trials — collecting and safeguarding the endpoint data that the world's largest pharmaceutical companies rely on to prove new medicines are safe and effective. The integrity of that data depends entirely on the stability of the network that carries it.
So when NetBrain's Check Point Summary Dashboard — powered by the Golden Assessment Library (GAL) — surfaced a hardware fault invisible to conventional monitoring, it was protecting far more than a firewall. During routine, automated network assessment, the dashboard flagged a failing BIOS (CMOS/RTC) battery on one of the customer's Check Point firewalls, across the full fleet in a single view.
Working from the finding, the team engaged Check Point TAC, followed the recommended remediation, and rebooted the firewall to resolve the fault. One at-risk perimeter firewall was identified and remediated proactively — before a power event or reboot could turn a slow-burning hardware problem into an unplanned outage on the network that underpins life-saving clinical research.
Why This Fault Was So Dangerous
Hardware health problems on network and security appliances are notoriously hard to see. A failing BIOS/CMOS battery is a textbook example: the device keeps running normally on main power, so uptime monitors, ping checks, and interface counters all report "green." The fault stays silent — right up until the next reboot or power interruption, when the real-time clock resets and the device may fail to boot cleanly or comes back with the wrong time.
For this customer, that hidden fault is especially dangerous. These firewalls sit in the path of the clinical-trial data flowing between devices, trial sites, patients, and the customer's platforms. A failure here doesn't just threaten connectivity — it threatens the availability and integrity of data that pharmaceutical sponsors and the FDA depend on. Traditional monitoring tools weren't catching the hardware fault, and manually checking hardware health across an entire Check Point fleet, device by device, is slow, error-prone, and rarely done until something breaks.
How They Caught It: Detect, Engage, Remediate
The proactive catch came from a systematic, repeatable approach built on continuous, automated assessment — one that eliminated the guesswork of manual, device-by-device hardware checks.
The Operational Shift — Key Contrasts
Why This Matters
This win illustrates the core promise of NetBrain's Golden Assessment Library: shifting network and security operations from reactive firefighting to proactive, automated assurance. By applying industry-wide outage knowledge as continuous, no-code assessments, GAL and the Check Point Summary Dashboard gave the customer visibility into a problem that would otherwise have stayed hidden until it became an incident — and let the team fix it first.
For most companies, catching a failing firewall battery is a good day for the network team. For this customer, it's something more. The network NetBrain helps keep stable is the same network that carries the clinical evidence behind FDA drug approvals for the world's largest pharmaceutical companies.
One silent fault. Caught before it mattered.
That's not luck. That's the Golden Assessment Library at work.