Cisco Certified Network Professional Practice Test 2025 – Your All-in-One Guide to Exam Success!

SSO, or Stateful Switchover, facilitates a hitless failover process, which means that the transition from a failed device to a standby device occurs without any loss of service or disruption to ongoing sessions. In a high-availability environment where SSO is implemented, the active and standby devices synchronize their states, including session information and data, allowing the standby device to take over seamlessly when the active device fails.

This capability is crucial for maintaining uninterrupted service in environments where downtime can be costly or disruptive. During the failover, existing connections remain active, and no traffic is dropped, making it a highly desirable feature for maintaining overall network reliability and performance.

Other forms of failover, such as complete failover with configuration loss or partial failover with degraded performance, do not provide the same level of effectiveness as SSO. Additionally, failovers that require manual intervention are not considered hitless and can lead to increased downtime, which is contrary to the advantages offered by SSO. Therefore, the correct identification of SSO’s functionality as providing a hitless failover highlights its benefits in enhancing network resilience and ensuring continuous operation.