There is no denying that enterprises need strong security measures to protect themselves from online attacks. This is the goal of a robust security architecture that can lessen these cybersecurity concerns and associated costs. A cyber-breach could cost your company a lot of money. What, therefore, can we do to aid in stopping these breaches? A security architecture is a collection of models, procedures, and security principles that support your goals and protect your business from online dangers.
The needs of a company are converted into executable security requirements through security architecture. A security architect must be familiar with the network, firewalls, defences, detection systems, and many other elements, just like in architecture, where the property is examined in terms of climate, soil type, terrain, and client preference.
Understanding The Offensive Side First
Understanding a system’s vulnerability is essential for a cybersecurity architect. This entails comprehending the technical aspects of each step in a cyber kill chain and how vulnerabilities are found and used to their advantage to compromise systems. This offers priceless guidance on how a system should be created with security in mind.
A cyber security architect does more than offer recommendations; they also take the initiative to tackle design, development, and implementation issues to ensure that the organisation has adequate cyber security. A cyber security architect’s job entails a variety of tasks, including:
- Thorough knowledge of business objectives
- The ability to communicate with a variety of audiences both inside and beyond the company. Stakeholders, many corporate departments, including development teams, IT architecture and Implementation, and outside vendors are all involved.
- Identify, investigate, and resolve various systemic or conventionally posed security issues within the company.
- Giving security advice to the technical leadership as part of strategic initiatives
Elements of Security Architecture
Because every organisation is distinct, each security architecture framework is specifically created to satisfy the requirements of a particular organisation. But from one architect to the next, the techniques and principles applied to achieve those needs are the same.
Security Architecture Frameworks Examples
A set of uniform rules and recommendations for establishing various levels of enterprise security architecture make up a security architecture framework. Security architects can use frameworks as recommendations. Companies may decide to create their frameworks by fusing existing international frameworks, like:
- TOGAF
- SABSA
- OSA
TOGAH Framework
What issues a company wishes to address with security design can be determined using the Open Group Architecture Framework, or TOGAF. It focuses on the initial stages of security architecture, outlines the scope and objectives of an organisation, and lists the issues that the company hopes to address through this approach. It does not offer any specific advice on how to deal with security vulnerabilities.
SABSA Framework
The Sherwood Applied Business Security Architecture, or SABSA, is a largely policy-driven framework that aids in defining the who, what, when, and why of the security architecture. Although it is frequently referred to as a “security architectural method,” it is not technical implementation specific. Its objective is to guarantee that security services are planned, provided, and supported as a crucial component of the business’s IT management.
OSA Framework
The Open Security Architecture, or OSA, is a technological security measure and functionality framework. It thoroughly reviews the most critical security challenges, rules, elements, and ideas that guide architectural choices while creating efficient security systems. Nevertheless, it is usually only used after the security architecture has been completed.
It’s All About Risk Management
The risk management aspect of security architecture. Risk is the impact uncertainty has on achieving your company’s goals. Missing an opportunity and encountering prospective risks are what cause delays. Protection from danger is only sometimes provided by security architecture. There must be a risk management component.
Information security risk management, or ISRM, limits hazards associated with using information technology. It comprises identifying, evaluating, and reacting to dangers to an organisation’s assets’ availability, confidentiality, and integrity. Instead of attempting to eliminate all potential risks, businesses can define and adopt an acceptable overall risk threshold for their company. Addressing hazards following the company’s risk tolerance is the ultimate goal of this strategy.
As part of the security architecture, risk management often entails identifying assets, potential vulnerabilities, threats, and controls and conducting thorough assessments regularly.
Security and Enterprise Architecture Need to Be Integrated
The creation of an enterprise architecture must be interwoven entirely with the creation of a security architecture.
It’s impossible to increase security in the majority of firms. Instead of creating an integrated security architecture, random work is done to secure various business components. Other areas of the company are frequently vulnerable to simple intrusion or compromise. Preventive, investigative, and corrective actions must be taken to provide a secure environment.
Traditional information security professionals often view security architecture as little more than the presence of security rules, controls, tools, and monitoring.
Business objectives should be understood by all security experts, who should work to achieve them by creating appropriate security controls tied to business risk and readily justifiable to stakeholders. Enterprise frameworks that support the alignment of security and business needs include SABSA and the TOGAF Standard.
Key Attributes of Security Architecture
All secure architecture is defined by four key characteristics that enable experts to assess the effectiveness of the structure and make any necessary adjustments. Understanding this fundamental framework will also make it easier to appreciate how your architecture functions and the advantages it provides for your business.
Relationships and Dependencies
A secure architecture relies on other components for each component to operate effectively. These connections let the architecture recognise dangers, communicate with other components, and automatically respond to dangerous incursions. Your architecture’s overall performance will likely suffer if one component is wrong. To make sure that your data is always protected, it’s crucial to regularly have a cyber security expert analyse and upgrade your architecture.
Standardisation
Because it is standardised, the security architecture is inexpensive. This means that controls built into the architecture can be applied repeatedly, reducing the requirement for unique designs and bespoke solutions. Several elements, such as benchmarking, risk management, economics, and legal and regulatory compliance, are often the foundations of the controls.
Similar designs can be used by most businesses to suit their security requirements. Although your company will likely be safeguarded entirely by employing a standardised architecture system, additional parts may occasionally be introduced to address more specialised security concerns or operational requirements.
Architectural Form
Although the functions of safe architecture are often specified, it can take many different shapes once installed. The architecture includes a portfolio of controls, relationship diagrams, principles, and other critical operating information to aid cybersecurity specialists in navigating each specific system. The sort of data you have and the main objectives of the architecture will determine the shape of your security architecture.
However, with the help of the provided catalogue, experts can quickly learn how the system operates and make any necessary adjustments to ensure your data is always protected.
Why Cyber Security Architecture is Important to an Organisation
Cyber threat actors generally threaten the assets of your company. Any organisation must, therefore, be well-equipped with personnel, procedures, and technological safeguards that will enable it to identify and address security concerns before threat actors do.
A network security architecture’s primary function is to protect an organisation against cyber threats. All of its IT infrastructure’s components should be protected by security measures.
An effective network security architecture should have the following characteristics;
Constantly find and close blind spots
Ascertain all the components of your estate to lower the risk of cyber-attacks. You can continuously monitor your attack surface and reduce risk by performing penetration testing, security design reviews, or code hardenings such as PHP security upgrades and managed services scans. This will guarantee that your network has no blind spots. The attack surface exposure to the Internet is inversely proportional to the number of blind spots.
Stringent network security controls
Make it more challenging for threat actors to locate and access company networks. This requires considering an attacker’s viewpoint and ensuring that a tiered protection technique is used. It entails lowering the likelihood of an assault, the lateral motions, the severity of an attack, and the capacity for a speedy recovery.
End-to-end Encryption
Ensure all your sensitive and confidential data is highly encrypted and sent using end-to-end encryption techniques. From the viewpoint of the law, protecting sensitive data frequently calls for strong security and privacy restrictions. In the event of data exposure, leaks, or breaches, organisations must be ready to handle the negative scenarios and know how to react and disclose such events.
Reducing the infection
Robust security architecture should lessen the effects of a network breach while adhering to simple yet effective concepts like a defence-in-depth strategy to ensure great difficulty for attackers. This implies that a threat actor needs more time to increase their success odds and the likelihood that they will be discovered or have their infiltration attempts stopped.
Benefits of Security Architecture
Strong Security Architecture Leads to Fewer Security Breaches
A company needs a security architectural framework in the age of modern technologies to safeguard sensitive data. As a result, the risks of an attacker successfully accessing the systems of a business are significantly reduced. The ability of security architecture to translate each distinct demand into actionable strategies and create a risk-free environment for a corporation while aligning with current security standards and business requirements is only one of the numerous advantages it offers.
The “holy grail” of security architecture is helping enterprises convince potential partners of their honesty and secrecy. Confidentiality, Integrity, and Accessibility—the three tenets of the CIA Triad—are supported by a good security architecture. Customers and business partners will more likely cooperate with and trust a company.
Proactive Security Measures Save Money
It costs money to mitigate cybersecurity threats. The suspension of production operations, product recalls, embarrassing press conferences, and subsequent reputational harm and significant financial loss are just a few potential effects of security breaches. When an issue is found during the early coding phases, the cost to rectify it might increase by up to 300%. The cost can increase by up to 3,000% if the same issue is found during post-release or manufacturing stages.
Integrating security at every manufacturing stage is advised to prevent or lessen the likelihood of mistakes occurring during product creation. All goods should be created with security, reducing the possibility of zero-day attacks and hastily applied (and consequently expensive) updates.
Mitigate Disciplinary Measures In the Event of a Breach
The likelihood of favourable outcomes in the case of an attack increases with an organisation’s efforts to minimise risks and vulnerabilities, even though cyber breach legislation repercussions vary from country to country. Working within the law can aid in avoiding sanctions, which will further harm a company’s profits and reputation.
Regulations have become harsher due to the adoption of GDPR, and businesses are working to maintain their technology compliance. The legislative environment is working furiously to keep up with technology as it is also developing swiftly at the same time. In other words, the rules and procedures on both sides of the equation are continually adjusted and tightened.
The best method to abide by the essential authorities and regulations and further protect your organisation from cyber attacks is to have a solid security architecture and use the required processes and tools to integrate the development cycle to detect problems
