# Evaluation of a New-Concept Secure File Server Solution
## 3 Research Methodology  
### The ARDS System and Study Questions  
The fundamental problem is that competitive protection solutions require advanced hardware tools, high-level professional support, and continuous financial investment,which is often not a viable option for the masses of small or medium-sized companies and educational or healthcare institutes. However, due to the often outdated software environment, the overloaded administrator teams, and the sensitivity of critical services, these systems are increasingly targeted by ransomware attacks. Since the primary objective is to protect critical data, it is important to create an easily manageable, resource-efficient file server solution that runs smoothly on earlier-generation hardware devices as well. The proposed solution should not only store and back up the data assets but should also be able to protect data and detect and report an attack. The problems described above require complex, multi-layered solutions. As a result of the authors' earlier research, a comprehensive protection solution [18] was designed and developed, which is introduced briefly for easier understanding of the contents of the new results.  
During the designing and development of the system, the main goal was to focus on the most important attack vectors (phishing [19], remote desk protocol (RDP) exploitation [20]) in order to be able to minimize the attack surface. Moreover, it was important to design the file server solution with the assumption that malware is already in the network, meaning that the central file server is the last possible point of protection. The solution developed is based on the previously published ARDS (Anti-Ransomware Defense System) model [18]. The model and its features can be seen in Figure 1.  
The ARDS model served as the test environment in our study. It has features that guarantee basic security, of which the local, point-to-point, IP-less backup system, scheduled snapshots on volume level, synchronized, encrypted backup to an off-site remote file server, and honeypot drive monitoring capabilities represent the basis for the protection. For more details, please see article [18].  
The question (RQ-1: Research Question 1) that arises is whether the proposed file server protection solution, in terms of functionality, achieves the expected protection in a way that the measurable parameters (transfer speed, network capacity utilization) do not fall short of the conventional file server architectures built on traditional platforms, compared to currently accepted and practiced solutions. Therefore, the main aim of the present study was to present the comparative performance test and its results for the proposed server environment. To answer this question, performance measurements were performed on different client-server architectures with a clean installation and default service environment settings.  
Additionally, the following research questions were raised during the study: RQ-2: Can the performance of systems with different service environments be compared using  
Figure 1: ARDS model concept and its features [18].  
default settings? RQ-3: If valid comparability is possible, is there currently a generally accepted method and metric that is not an individual performance indicator of each system but can quantitatively characterize heterogeneous systems with a well-defined metric as an aggregated performance indicator of functionally constructed architectures?