Security By Design

Bring your Security Architecture to Life

The combination of modelling and automation enables you to visualise and validate the behaviour of your architecture at the design stage:

Improved Communication:: Models provide a clear, single source of truth, enabling stakeholders from different disciplines to collaborate effectively around a common understanding.; Automation adds the ability to generate user-friendly, on-demand visualisations;
Multi-Directional Traceability:: Models are flexible, hyperlinked structures in which each node is connected (no isolation!). Scripts discover and validate these links, enabling full, bi-directional traceability:
e.g. policy to controls, vulnerability to value stream, data acquisition, usage and disposal.; This insight helps ensure that stakeholder needs are addressed across the ADM lifecycle.
Faster Decision-Making:: As the model provides a machine-readable representation the system, scripts can be used to simulate and analyse system behaviour, performance and trade-offs at design stage. This contributes to the quality and agility of decision-making and problem-solving.
Reduced Risks:: By identifying potential issues earlier in the design process, models reduce the risk of costly design flaws or system failures later in development or during operation.
Improved Consistency and Quality:: Standardised model notation helps maintain consistency across all stages of design and development, ensuring higher-quality deliverables and seamless integration.; Automation offers validation against design standards for correctness and completeness
Agile Change Management:: Changes can be applied faster and more assuredly as needed. Models enable the impact to be assessed from multiple stakeholder viewpoints, proposed changes can be easily reviewed and, when a decision is made, all documentation can be easily updated.; This helps teams manage evolving requirements or design modifications effectively.

Aligning Security Strategy to Business Strategy

In today’s digital landscape, security can no longer operate as a standalone function —it must be strategically aligned with business objectives to support growth, resilience, and compliance. Security Strategy must be embedded at the core of an organisation’s Business Strategy and maintained in dynamic alignment to ensure that risk management, regulatory compliance, and cyber resilience.

Without this alignment, organisations can face delays, inefficiencies, increased costs, and security measures that fail to support business goals, leading to gaps in compliance, increased operational risk, and missed opportunities for innovation.

By ensuring that security objectives directly support business priorities, organisations can achieve agility, cost-effectiveness, and high assurance, while maintaining evidence-based compliance.

Realising Security Strategy as Architecture

Enterprise Architecture (EA) provides a structured and visual approach to designing security solutions that are traceable to business objectives. By using Enterprise Architecture diagrams, organizations can model:

The derivation of security requirements from business goals.
The traceability of security controls to risks, policies, and compliance mandates.
The integration of security processes into the enterprise IT landscape.

The best-known and most effective methodologies to achieve this is SABSA —a risk-driven security framework that ensures a clear line of sight from business strategy to security implementation.

Using Enterprise Architecture modelling, organisations can:

Define business-driven security attributes using SABSA’s contextual layer.
Translate business needs into security requirements through logical and conceptual models.
Automate documentation by generating requirement specifications, risk assessments, and compliance posture from the model.
Validate security effectiveness with traceable evidence of compliance, risk mitigation and policy enforcement.

Evidence-Based Compliance

Evidence-based compliance presents a significant challenge to many organisations, particularly those operating in multi-regulatory environments. Modelling and automation offers an elegant, architected approach:

Modularity:

Regulations, standards, control frameworks, maturity models & reference architectures can all be modelled as described in the SABSA Security Overlay.

Once transformed into ArchiMate, they become highly-modular and reusable. Simply import them into your target architecture and visually wire up the requirements to the control implementation.

No need to re-invent the wheel, CEM offers a catalogue of ready-made models, for a flying start.

Normalised Control Sets:

Normalised control sets are often required to insulate Project Teams from the aggregated scale & complexity of working with multiple source frameworks.

The hyperlinked structure of models is ideally suited to track and maintain what can grow to be thousands of cross-references, with no loss of detail or context

Design Effectiveness:

Because the composite model is both standardised and lossless, scripts can verify that requirements are:

Complete: all that are in-scope and applicable for a particular context, are selected;
Applied: controls can be traced from policy document to control mechanism – and back!.

Integrated Risk Analysis

Architectural models provide an ideal basis for risk analysis. They are a blueprint that shows where assets are located, where threats emanate from, and the exposed attack surfaces and vectors that might be exploited.

Control Placement:

From such analysis, the model can then be enriched with the security perspective, showing where controls are deployed: exposing gaps or isolated controls that could be vulnerable as single points of failure.

Automation can enrich this analysis further, for example by annotating controls with their ‘Detect’, ‘Protect’, ‘Detect’, ‘Respond’ or ‘Recover’ capability to identify the degree of defence in depth..

Risk Analysis:

The model’s links enable traceability from technical vulnerabilities to business impacts.

By capturing the potency of the threat, the effectiveness of controls and the scale & nature of impact, the model contains all the data essential for qualitative or quantitative risk analysis.

Risk Management:

Cost-effective risk management is complicated by the many-to-many mapping of risks to controls.

Because each risk and each control exists only once in the underlying model, we can use scripts to ensure that control changes are propagated to recalculate all dependent risks in the target architecture.