You define networks under Manage > Topology: Sites & Networks. On the Sites & Networks page, you enable a specific network to be securable; that is, to encrypt traffic for secure transport. You can only define secure networks on the SCC; you can’t define secure networks on the SteelHead.

Networks represent the WAN clouds that sites and site types use to communicate to each other using Primary MPLS, VSAT, or the internet. Essentially, a network connects two uplinks between two sites.

Networks are very important for path selection and secure transport. A secure network is specifically used for the secure transport. The SCC creates two nonsecure networks: MPLS and Internet. You can create additional secure and nonsecured networks or rename the precreated networks based on your topology requirements.

For secure transport, you must specify that a network is securable to ensure that the network is part of the secure transport group. A secure transport group is a set of SteelHeads that share the same cryptographic keys and have connectivity to each other. Any member of the secure transport group can create a tunnel to any other member of the same group instantaneously, without delay. The traffic doesn’t incur any added latency waiting for the tunnels to establish. For detailed information about configuring secure transport, see Managing secure transport.

You can specify a secure transport concentrator if you don’t want to overload your SteelHead in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) so that you can perform secure transport or if you want to off load secure transport to be done for internet-bound traffic only. For detailed information, see Configuring secure transport concentrators.

With RiOS 9.2 and SCC 9.2 or later, SteelHeads with path selection enabled automatically perform Traffic Aware Backoff Probing. SteelHeads gradually reduce probing frequency to remote sites that have no traffic, from the default rate of every 2 seconds down to the default Max Backoff interval of every 1800 seconds. You configure the Max Backoff Interval when you define a network on the SCC.

You can change the Max Backoff Interval using the SCC to whatever value is best suited for your network environment.

On the SteelHead, you can view the back-off probe setting using the show path-selection debug networks CLI command.

For detailed information about improving hybrid scaling probing techniques using the Max Backoff Interval in Networks, see Managing path selection.