StoneGate Firewalls and IPS sensors have built-in clustering and load balancing that removes the need for third-party clustering solutions. Clustering ensures high availability of the security engines, thus allowing uninterrupted operations during system maintenance and updates. StoneGate's built-in load balancing capabilities allow security engines to dynamically balance connections between cluster nodes, transparently transferring connections to available nodes in case a node becomes overloaded or fails. Load balancing is a great way to share the computationally intense processes like deep packet inspection and VPN processing across the cluster of nodes.