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Requirements: Performance

Performance is closely tied to availability in cybersecurity — when systems respond too slowly to be usable, the practical impact mirrors a full outage. Degraded performance risks customer frustration, reputational damage, and lost revenue.

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About this video

Performance is not a formal component of the CIA Triad, but it operates as a practical extension of availability. Where availability is binary — a resource is either accessible or it is not — performance is gradual and continuous. A system can respond quickly, respond sluggishly, or degrade to a point where it becomes functionally inaccessible, even if it technically remains online. A page expected to load in half a second that instead takes twenty seconds is, from the user's perspective, indistinguishable from one that is fully unavailable. The business implications of poor performance closely mirror those of a true availability failure. When systems do not meet the performance thresholds users expect, frustration sets in, customers disengage, and organizations absorb the downstream effects in the form of reduced revenue, diminished profit, and lasting reputational harm. For this reason, performance deserves the same organizational attention as the core principles of the CIA Triad, regardless of whether it is formally categorized alongside them.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Performance & Availability

Key terms

CIA Triad
The three core principles of information security: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability.
Availability
The assurance that systems and data are accessible and operational when needed by authorized users.
Performance
The measure of how efficiently a system responds to user requests; degraded performance can render a system functionally unavailable and result in lost revenue and reputation.

Topics

Availability Cia Triad Performance Requirements System Performance Business Impact Cybersecurity Fundamentals

Transcript

Let's say you were to go to a website and it behaves very slowly, that everything you do is just very slow to respond. This can be frustrating, and so performance is an issue as well. We want to make sure that our systems have a certain level of performance.

Performance and availability

Notice that performance isn't on our CIA Triad, but I do feel like it's just another extension of availability, and I'll show you why. Availability is really a yes or no: is it available to you, or is it not available to you? But performance is something that can happen gradually. That means it could perform very well and be very speedy, or it could be so slow that, if it goes slow enough, it just doesn't feel like it's available at all. If you take that to the extreme, and let's say a page that you're expecting to come up in half a second takes 20 seconds instead, really it just becomes unusable.

So I really do feel like performance is related to availability. Whether you consider it part of availability or not, it really does have the same repercussions that availability has: if it's not performing to the level your customers want, then this is problematic and you're going to have a loss of reputation. If your customers are expecting a certain level of performance and they're not getting it, they could get frustrated and leave your services, reducing the revenue that your company has, reducing the amount of profit that it's making.

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