#avaiability

Recently I talked with my friend T about marriage. 

T has been married for about 7 years. I have never met her husband, but their relationship sounds like a really good friendship and I always think their life sounds fun.

On the other hand, I am not married. As I get older, the responsibility that comes with marriage and family, the hardness of the marriage system, that makes it very difficult to get out of,and  the statistics that say married women’s lives get shorter and married men get to live longer are making  it almost impossible to find positive aspects of marriage.

However, T’s stories give me the impression that she is enjoying her life in  her own way and therefore I do not receive negative impression about marriage from her.

The other day, T and I talked about marriage based on the concept of cyber security.

T’s job is related to security and I used to work in the similar field and that’s why our conversation took that form. Marriage through the eye of security was quite interesting.

I said  to T, “I do not particularly want to marry, but since a married couple can support each other financially especially when one of the two becomes unable to work, I think it sounds like a good thing.”

So T said, “Well. So you point out availability as a pro for a marriage.”

Availability here means to avoid an unavailable process of information by using another system when a system cannot work properly.

Let me explain in a very simple way. For example, in a company, data is used in many places through servers. If there is only one server, it is possible that the company’s business stops when the one and only server get attacked or when the server cannot properly function. In order to prevent such an incident, companies have multiple servers as backup. With such precaution, even if Server A becomes unavailable,the business will not stop because Server B or  is available and companies can keep making profits. Such state can be described as “The company’s servers ensure availability.”

“I’ve never used the word, ‘availability,” but it sounds about right,” said I. 

Then T’s eyes widened. “But it is not necessarily the case. Vulnerability can be bigger due to marriage.”

Her explanation goes like this. If we see a marriage like building a network by connecting two servers, each server is already connected to other servers called family and family itself is a network. So marriage is connecting two servers that belong to different networks.

Let me add a little bit of explanation. If we stick to T’s theory, the ideal marriage is robust and secure connection of the servers without vulnerabilities.

However, according to T, servers in networks called family have vulnerability anyway. Thus it can be said that connecting networks called family consisting of servers with vulnerabilities is a marriage.

I short, T thinks that marriage is not about availability, but about connection and expansion of networks with vulnerabilities.

She also said, “Marriage could not only bring availability in a marriage, but also vulnerabilities. So that marriage is a good thing is just a one-sided view.”

Since I had understood marriage as a matter of availability, I had believed that a single person had to be a robust server. However, if a marriage is an act of building a network including vulnerability, being a single person means not expanding a vulnerability.

But in reality, neither marriage nor family is a server or network. They are about real people. That's why there are essences, richness and interestingness, that do not appear in the discussion of cuber security.