Book Image

Practical Cybersecurity Architecture - Second Edition

By : Diana Kelley, Ed Moyle
Book Image

Practical Cybersecurity Architecture - Second Edition

By: Diana Kelley, Ed Moyle

Overview of this book

Cybersecurity architecture is the discipline of systematically ensuring that an organization is resilient against cybersecurity threats. Cybersecurity architects work in tandem with stakeholders to create a vision for security in the organization and create designs that are implementable, goal-based, and aligned with the organization’s governance strategy. Within this book, you'll learn the fundamentals of cybersecurity architecture as a practical discipline. These fundamentals are evergreen approaches that, once mastered, can be applied and adapted to new and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. You’ll learn how to address and mitigate risks, design secure solutions in a purposeful and repeatable way, communicate with others about security designs, and bring designs to fruition. This new edition outlines strategies to help you work with execution teams to make your vision a reality, along with ways of keeping designs relevant over time. As you progress, you'll also learn about well-known frameworks for building robust designs and strategies that you can adopt to create your own designs. By the end of this book, you’ll have the foundational skills required to build infrastructure, cloud, AI, and application solutions for today and well into the future with robust security components for your organization.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1: Security Architecture
4
Part 2: Building an Architecture
9
Part 3: Execution

Understanding goals

“The most important piece of architecture is to understand the why: why it is that you are doing what it is that you are doing. Understanding the why leads you to the how. Understand it in the context of the broader business and organization goals context and let that be the guide to when and how you implement security.”

Ted Ipsen, President and COO at Positroniq, LLC

It is a truism that the work of the architect must start and end with enabling the organization to accomplish its goals. Security is not an end in and of itself – it doesn’t operate in a vacuum. This means it is only useful in furtherance of some other goal that an organization or individual has.

You can prove this is the case by considering what security controls you’d use if there were no threats to defend against. For example, would you use antivirus software if malware didn’t exist? Would you hire armed guards to protect an empty room...