What is Cybersecurity Architecture?
Cybersecurity architecture is the cornerstone of an organization’s protection against cyber-attacks, which guarantees that all components of its IT infrastructure are safeguarded. Cybersecurity architecture is also how various components of your cyber or computer system are arranged, synchronized, and connected.
It involves protecting and safeguarding several environments within an organization to yield optimum benefits. These environments include:
- Networks
- IoT
- Cloud
- Endpoints
Mobile
The idea behind creating an enterprise cybersecurity architecture
The core idea behind implanting a cyber-security architecture is to have a pre-emptive threat prevention technology to stop sophisticated attacks before they cause damage. To provide consistent protection throughout the whole IT infrastructure, companies must forecast and block both known and undiscovered malware and other threats.
To defend their most vital assets from modern cyber threats, small and large businesses should establish a centralized infrastructure security architecture.
Key stages of cybersecurity architecture
Like any IT architecture, the cybersecurity architecture too involves several phases within its purview.
- Risk Assessment: This section assesses the impact of critical business assets, hazards, and the consequences of vulnerabilities and security threats on your firm.
- Architecture and Design: At this stage, security services are designed and built to aid in the protection of your organization’s assets while also facilitating business risk exposure targets and goals.
- Implementation and control: in this stage, the cybersecurity services and processes are operated, implemented, monitored, and managed. The architecture is structured to ensure that all security policies, standards, architecture decisions, and risk management are fully deployed for the future.
- Monitoring and management: Threat and vulnerability management are used to monitor, oversee, and manage the operational state, as well as examine the impact of the system’s security.
Dos and Don’ts of Cybersecurity architecture
Have realistic expectations
Naturally, people focus on creating the most secure set-up item possible. However, the reality is that nothing can ever be 100% secure. There is, however, a cost. You can spend months setting it together with the most secure system, but it won’t help you if you go out of business. So, it is always good to have realistic expectations. You must know where to draw the line.
The best way to crack this is to advocate for 80 percent security, focusing on the critical aspects first, which can be accomplished in a shorter amount of time. Then work towards achieving the remaining 20%.
Implement Threat Modeling
Threat modeling is a valuable concept you can include while creating security architecture for your organization. It deals with figuring out what threats you’re up against, like What is the threat? When will it happen? What causes this threat? So on and so forth. In short, threat modeling helps you choose the proper controls.
STRIDE is a helpful strategy to help perform threat modeling:
Spoofing: Impersonating a different user, different IP address, etc.
Tampering: The ease with which people can tamper with data
Repudiation: How easy it is for users to do an action in your system and then claim they didn’t
Information disclosure: The polar opposite of privacy.
Denial of Service: How easy it is for hackers to shut down your service
Elevation of privilege: Authorizing users to elevate their privilege in your system.
Don’t interconnect all your systems
When it comes to flexibility and engagement facilitation, interconnected systems sound like a fantastic idea. But not so when it comes to security. As we know that disasters can strike at any time and can happen in an unprecedented manner. So, the smart way to handle this is to segment or isolate elements of systems segmenting parts of the system so that if the system is breached, compromised, or misused, the damage is limited.
Don’t imitate other security architecture
This is one of the widely committed mistakes because it’s easy and quick. But, copying security architecture just don’t work. The security model of the medical company would be different from, let’s say, a social media company. Each company has its own reinforced areas and weaker points, so it is always safe to create your own.
Think like a criminal to counter a criminal
This not only applies to police procedurals, but this strategy also works well with security systems. Sometimes you might have to think like a hacker to create the best ring of protection for your organization. Security architecture is all about strategy, calculation, and validation. To have all these qualities, you must measure the effectiveness of the controls in the end. That’s where having a hacker mindset can help.
Conclusion
Security architecture is vast and growing. It would be great if you considered both defensive and offensive measures. In this ever-changing cybersecurity landscape, organizations need to employ qualified and well-trained cyber security architects to build a robust security architecture to address the growing security needs effectively.
Netlabs Global is one of the leaders in providing state-of-the-art Cyber Security & Compliance services to help enterprises defend against cyber risks and position with a high-level preparedness against looming threats. Talk to us today to learn more about how our solutions can help your business.
