A common issue hampering performance of many organizations of all sizes is the presence of bottlenecks. A bottleneck is a point in a system, process, or network where the capacity is restricted, causing data, materials, or tasks to queue up and limiting the overall throughput of the entire operation. Bottlenecks exist everywhere, from home PCs to entire enterprise networks. Everybody has had an experience where they try to run a program on their computer, and the demands of the software suck up the computer’s resources, resulting in everything running poorly. The bottleneck could be caused by the processor, memory, disk input/output, network card, or a combination of any of them. Tools like Windows Resource Monitor and Task Manager allow you to see these bottlenecks in real time.
Going beyond individual devices, bottlenecks can exist in network infrastructure and system backbones. These bottlenecks have greater consequences than ones impacting individual devices, as whole business processes and functions can be hampered. For example, an organization with a single wireless access point may have more users and devices than the access point can handle, resulting in poor network performance. Or a server hosting an internal web application could lack proper components to meet the demands of multiple users accessing the web app. All these bottlenecks, if quantified, can be striking in terms of lost productivity and returns.
The CIA Triad highlights Availability as one of the core areas of proper information security. Bottlenecks are one of the biggest threats to availability, so it should be a priority for organizations to identify and eliminate bottlenecks through their information security programs. How bottlenecks are identified depends on the capabilities and technological maturity of the specific organization. Small businesses and side hustle gigs likely only have a few devices and consumer grade network equipment. In these cases, admins can monitor built in performance monitoring tools such as Windows Performance Monitor and Resource Monitor. Free tools like SpeedTest can test the quality of Internet connectivity at various points.
Larger organizations likely have dashboards and centralized performance monitoring tools for entire networks, systems, and applications. For a truly thorough bottleneck assessment, organizations should review historical performance data spanning a variety of loads, times of day, and other circumstances. For many consumer grade monitoring tools, identifying bottlenecks can be as easy as looking at a line graph of performance history and highlighting the periods where the line goes up by a substantial amount. These identified periods of time can then be closely scrutinized so they can be correlated with other network and organizational data to find trends and get to the root cause of the bottlenecks. All this data should be heavily documented, and a professional report prepared for future use in business cases, risk assessments, and steering committee meetings. Verified bottlenecks will need to be addressed the same as other information security risks: by selecting countermeasures, implementing them, and monitoring the control effectiveness throughout the future.