Cumulative effect in IT security

In the field of IT security , the cumulative effect (from the Latin cumulare = to heap up) is an effect that results in an overall higher total damage due to the accumulation of several (even smaller) damages on an IT system.

Example: Five application systems are installed on a server, each of which has a “medium” protection requirement. According to the so-called maximum principle, the server receives the protection requirement “medium”. The cumulative effect (caused by five installed application systems), however, now indicates that consideration should be given to whether the protection requirement of the server should not be classified as higher than "medium" because the total damage in the event of a failure can / will be higher than medium.

Web links

• Federal Office for Information Security: IT-Grundschutz-Standards , accessed on August 30, 2009.