Cisco Certified Network Professional 2026 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

Storm control is a vital feature in network management that helps to protect a network from broadcast, multicast, and unicast flooding by placing limits on the amount of traffic that can be forwarded. When the network experiences excessive flooding, it can degrade performance and lead to network outages. Storm control allows network administrators to define thresholds for acceptable traffic levels.

By restricting the flood rate, storm control ensures that the amount of traffic deemed as flooding is kept within manageable limits. This means that when traffic exceeds a certain predefined threshold, the excess packets are dropped rather than being forwarded to all ports. This preventative measure maintains the overall health and availability of network resources, ensuring that legitimate packets can continue to traverse the network without interruption. The implementation also helps to improve bandwidth utilization and minimizes the risk of network congestion.

Thus, storm control effectively contributes to the stability of the network by putting a cap on excessive traffic through active management of the flooding rate.