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Cybersecurity vs Interoperability & High Availability
Sarah Kolberg | January 31, 2024
In industry, healthcare and other critical infrastructures, high system availability is a top priority. The infrastructure and networks are designed for reliability. New technical developments offer great profitable opportunities for these sectors. To take advantage of those, interoperability is required. Rigid, isolated security concepts must be broken down to create interfaces. However, these bring additional complexity and can become gateways for attackers. How can interoperability and high availability be securely combined?
Interoperability
Interoperability describes the functional property of connectivity with different systems, devices or applications as well as the ability to communicate and cooperate with them. This requires open interfaces for connecting other systems, such as an API interface.
Data exchange in particular can offer advantages. To enable this, standards must be implemented.
These include:
- Access authorizations
- Uniform syntactic understanding: protocols & formats
- Uniform semantic understanding: data structure, coding, data transfer, exchange and interpretation
- Cross-system processes: non-technical aspects such as guidelines, workflows, standards, role concepts
Interoperability is important for the growth and usability of modern technologies. Interoperable systems require fewer resources and less maintenance. Those who ensure interoperability can usually establish better data quality as well as more efficient data processing and usage.
However, interfaces also make a system more vulnerable. There must be an awareness of the corresponding interactions between the systems. Data exchange results in higher requirements for data security and cybersecurity.
The standards that are created to achieve interoperability should include and implement security standards. Organizational measures for clear cross-system processes can also contribute to security. Connectivity also brings advantages for cybersecurity, as new security solutions can be implemented more quickly and easily.
High availability
High availability describes the reliability of a system or installation and the ability to function continuously over a certain period of time. The aim is usually to achieve five-nines availability. This means that the system is available 99.999 percent of the time.
Metrics for measuring availability
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): expected time span between two system failures
Mean Downtime (MDT): average downtime of the system
Recovery Time Objective (RTO): time required for repair or recovery in the event of an unplanned system failure
Before deployment, a high-availability system is extensively tested, backups and failover solutions are set up. To ensure high system availability, the single point of failure principle is usually followed. This means: If a failure occurs, it can be attributed to a single component. Strictly speaking, this principle cannot be implemented by connecting different systems and interfaces.
The detectability of failures must be ensured with the aim of high availability. In the best-case scenario, there are systems and mechanisms that take effect automatically if a component fails so that operations can continue seamlessly. This can be achieved, for example, by installing redundancies that enable a crossover to another component that continues the same process. This must not result in a loss of performance or data. In terms of efficiency, duplicate structures seem counterproductive. However, they are a necessary safeguard for system availability.
Balancing act between high availability and interoperability
Interoperability brings a lot of potential and functions, but increases the complexity of systems. This can make troubleshooting more difficult. If the complexity of a system increases, it becomes more difficult to guarantee high availability. The Network Access Control solution macmon NAC can strengthen high availability in IT and OT networks. macmon NAC Scalability offers highly available NAC scenarios to protect systems with high demands on network security and system availability. The NAC solution gives you an overview of all accesses, connected systems and network components so that failures or threats can be quickly assigned. macmon NAC is a powerful tool for implementing clear roles, appropriate access authorizations, security standards and compliance. Data traffic and connectivity are visible in the NAC solution.
macmon NAC itself has a REST API and can be easily connected to existing systems or future solutions. The numerous technology partnerships with other security product providers enable data sharing, new functions and value-added processes for even better cybersecurity. macmon NAC can be part of your security concept to map interoperability under the safest possible circumstances and at the same time ensure the best possible high availability.