Network security metrics and performance for healthcare systems management

Abstract

While enhanced cybersecurity options, mainly based around cryptographic functions, are needed overall speed and performance of a healthcare network may take priority in many circumstances. As such the overall security metrics and performance of those cryptographic functions in their embedded context needs to be understood in detail. Understanding those metrics has been the main aim of this research activity. This research reports on an implementation of one network security technology, Internet Protocol Security (IPSec), to evaluate security performance. This research simulates sensitive healthcare information being transferred over a network, and then measures data delivery times with selected security parameters for various communication types running under different operating systems. Based on our performance experiments, this research has indicated a number of network security metrics that need to be considered when designing and managing network security for healthcare-specific or non-healthcare-specific systems from security, performance and manageability perspectives. This research proposes distinct recommendations based on our test results to contribute to selecting the appropriate security metrics for achieving the correct balance between network security and performance.