Power consumption of emerging cybersecurity technologies on network devices

Abstract

This thesis investigated the current matureness of IT systems in relation to flexibility support through application level controls with the aim of determining the future direction for emerging cybersecurity features. The research was driven by interest in investigating how flexibility principle could affect cybersecurity. This was accomplished through literature review of the current knowledge on IT systems and available controls and three power consumption experiments with each of them focusing on different solution. In literature review part it was found that flexibility is not commonly available and enabling support for it may require moving workloads from dedicated hardware to virtualized environment. Comparatively in experiment portion it was found that the throughput penalty of cybersecurity complexity at the highest can be 50 percent in active network devices. This indicated that for organizations with known throughput needs at least one model above the matching throughput should be selected if maximum cybersecurity feature set is to be used. Through literature review and experimentation, a grounded theory was established and assessed. Thesis concludes that current cybersecurity solutions do not support flexibility to the level flexibility principle needs to and as such there is clear need for adaptive cybersecurity solution that could automatically either downscale feature set complexity or change the workload from individual nodes to computationally more robust node. In literary review section some sources suggest data centre operators should choose the more efficient cybersecurity algorithms to curtail excess power consumption.