Garland Technology

Garland Technology makes the hardware that gets a copy of network traffic to the tools that need to see it. The catalog covers network TAPs, packet brokers, inline bypass TAPs and hardware data diodes. Chris Bihary and Jerry Dillard founded the company in 2011, and the name comes from Garland, Texas, where Dillard is from. Garland has offices in Buffalo, New York and Richardson, Texas, and engineers and manufactures its products in Richardson. It sells to IT and OT teams alike, and part of the range is built with industrial sites in mind: small metal enclosures, DIN-rail mounting, and passive fiber models that need no power at all. That gives a plant or a substation hardware sized for a control cabinet as well as a data center rack.

In an OT network, monitoring usually stalls at getting the packets to the sensor. A detection tool can only report on the traffic it receives, and it has to listen without sending anything back toward the controllers. The usual source is a SPAN port on an industrial switch, which Garland argues was never built for continuous monitoring. A network TAP sits on the link itself and sends a full copy of the traffic to the sensor while the link carries on as normal. Where a SPAN port is the only option, Garland recommends putting a hardware data diode between the switch and the sensor. The diode passes traffic in one direction only, enforced by physical separation inside the device, so nothing can travel back into the control network through the monitoring connection. Aggregators then combine several of those feeds into one.

On OT Cyber Direct you can buy Garland hardware the way you would buy any other part. Prices are listed on the product page, items that need a quote are marked, and orders ship straight from Garland's own facility with tracking sent to you. The Copper Breakout TAP (P1GCCB) is the most popular product on our site. Several Garland products are sold with their required components as a bundle, and each component shows up as its own SKU line item on the order, which keeps purchase orders clean. If you are not sure whether you need a TAP, a data diode or both, start with the builder further down this page or ask one of our OT cyber experts. Tell us the link speed, the media type and what your sensor expects, and we will point you to a part number.