Preface
Cybersecurity is quickly becoming a make or break topic area for most businesses. We can all cite numerous examples from the headlines that underscore the importance of security: this includes security issues at both large and small companies, breach notifications from the online services we use, and incidents in the companies we work with and for. We all know stories of vulnerable software, scammed users, accidental misconfiguration of hardware or software, and numerous other events that can and do have potentially disastrous consequences for both individuals and organizations.
All of this is happening against a backdrop where artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are becoming ubiquitous and changing how we do things. More and more, business processes are changing their processes to adapt and accommodate these new methods. They’re changing the services they offer, how they engage with customers and partners, how they interact with stakeholders (employees, partners, customers, and others), and numerous other changes.
To help prevent security issues while at the same time best positioning to gain benefits from new technologies such as AI and ML, organizations continue to place increasing importance on cybersecurity. They are making it a higher priority than it has historically been and investing in it accordingly. But how can an organization know whether they are investing in the right places? Resources are finite, which means that they need to be selective about what security measures they implement and where they apply those limited budgets. How can organizations know when they have enough security? How do they know that they’ve attained their security goals when the necessary steps are dependent on factors unique to them: what the organization does, how it does it, who’s involved, and why? Everything from organizational culture to business context to governing regulations to geography and even industry can play a role here.
Cybersecurity architecture is one way to systematically, holistically, and repeatably answer these questions. Much like a software architect creates a vision for how to achieve a user’s goals in software or a network engineer creates a vision for how to achieve the performance and reliability targets for network communications, the cybersecurity architect works to create a vision for cybersecurity. This can be for an application, a network, a process, a business unit, or the entire organization itself.
This book takes a practical look at the nuts and bolts of defining, documenting, validating, and, ultimately, delivering an architectural vision. It draws on existing standards and frameworks for cybersecurity architecture, outlining where (and more importantly, how) they can be applied to the architecture process in your organization. This book does this by walking through the architecture process step by step, discussing why each step provides the value it does and how to use it to maximum benefit, and provides tips, gotchas, case studies, and techniques from numerous working architects in the field to supplement our own perspective.
