The Impact of Unavailability on the Effectiveness of Enterprise Information Security Technologies

This paper surveys existing enterprise technologies that control access to confidential digital data, and analyzes the impact of system and staff unavailability on the obtained security. The researched technologies allow restrictions to be placed on copying, editing, viewing and printing from within various software applications, provide auditing options and prevent outsider access through encryption. We discuss USB access control solutions, digital rights management software, disk encryption techniques and operating system solutions, respectively. An interesting aspect of the various technologies is their reliance on the cooperation of various people and system components, thus making it vulnerable to unavailability of these people and components. Two opposite effects (security risk and productivity loss) determine the effectiveness of information security technologies, and we analyze the impact of unavailability of resources on both these metrics.