How do you keep up with the latest security architecture trends and innovations, such as cloud, AI, or IoT?

Security governance and compliance are essential aspects of security architecture design, but they can also pose significant challenges in a dynamic and complex environment. How do you keep up with the latest security architecture trends and innovations, such as cloud, AI, or IoT, while also ensuring that your organization meets the relevant standards and regulations? In this article, you will find some of the best practices and tools that can help you achieve security governance and compliance in the context of security architecture design.

1 Define your security objectives

The first step in achieving security governance and compliance is to define your security objectives and align them with your business goals and strategy. This will help you identify the risks, threats, and vulnerabilities that you need to address, as well as the security controls and measures that you need to implement. It’s also helpful to know which compliance initiatives affect your organization. Take time to assess which legal, contractual, and internal measures apply to your data so you can foster a framework that meets, or even exceeds, these standards. There also may be legal, regulatory, and ethical requirements that apply to your industry and region, such as GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS. (This section has been updated by LinkedIn editors based on member feedback.)

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Ashoka Reddy

Director of Academy 42001 where consulting professionals are empowered to champion and implement Ethical AI
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Security Governance and ensuring Regulatory Compliance are Board 'Duties of Responsibility'. The scope, responsibilities, and reference to the Information Security Strategy, would be documented in an Information Security Charter. Determining Security Objectives involves, not just one step, but five key steps that need to be focused on sequentially in their own right: 1. Discover and document all mission-critical assets. 2. Research all vulnerabilities, and which threat actors are likely to exploit them. 3. Compile a risk register, prioritizing the risks to be mitigated. 4. Identify security controls needed to mitigate those risks. 5. Check regulatory compliance according to data sovereignty and industry.

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Kathleen Moriarty
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Business objectives provide a starting point to determine what functionality is necessary and how they can be achieved. It may be possible to reduce the attack surface by selecting products to meet the business objectives that consider security and ongoing management in their design. Examples include secure cloud-based options, resilient cloud native infrastructure, or end user access using a minimized OS, secured applications, and allow list approaches. It may be possible to design an architecture for which security was considered in the business application rather than bolting it on later to meet these regulatory and policy requirements through the use of multiple additional tools. How might you achieve built-in security managed at scale?

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2 Assess your security posture

The next step is to assess your current security posture and identify the gaps and weaknesses that need to be remediated. You can use various frameworks and methodologies to conduct a security assessment, such as NIST, ISO, or COBIT. A security assessment will help you evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of your existing security architecture, policies, processes, and technologies, and provide you with recommendations and action plans to improve them.

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Michelle Griffith

Security Engineer and Enterprise Architect | Transforming chaos into proactive threat-informed defenses to deter & defend against cyber villains! #DataDriven 🛡️#Cybersecurity #InfoSec
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NIST CSF and other frameworks, guidance and standards are key to ensuring security by design - when it comes to truly understanding the effectiveness of baseline operational security architectures - its important to consider organizational attack surface and how effective security measure as implemented (people, policy/process and technology) are against likely threat actions to evaluate security measure strengths, gaps, & weakness providing insight into “impact and consequences” if not addressed. Automation and integrations - attack surface management (ASM) and security validation/breach attack simulation solutions aligned to aforementioned frameworks and standards - coupled with GRC solutions provide true baseline insight

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Wayne Anderson

Information Security and Data Protection Leader at BDO Digital, CISM, GSLC, C|CISO
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Start with basic interviews and discovery. Your team knows well how they operate tools and the process integrity that support those tools. Create an environment of continuous improvement where finding opportunities is rewarded, not a cause for concern. Use industry data on practice for your segment, including regulatory benchmarks or industry data like CIS or NIST CSF to compare your level of practice to peers or expectations. Then prioritize the gaps against those areas that are most likely to be exploited in your line of business. These capability gaps should be the first investments in security architecture updates.

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steve eyre

Security practice lead advisor
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I find it useful to assess using a maturity model like CMMC to measure current posture maturity and desired target maturity aligned to business strategic goals. In that way you can flesh out what is important and proportionate risk treatment.

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3 Design your security architecture

Based on your security objectives and assessment results, you can design your security architecture to address your specific needs and challenges. Your security architecture should provide a holistic and comprehensive view of your security domain, covering the people, processes, and technologies involved. You should also consider the security architecture principles and best practices that can help you achieve security by design, such as defense in depth, least privilege, or separation of duties.

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4 Implement your security solutions

Once you have designed your security architecture, you need to implement the security solutions that will enable you to achieve your security objectives. These may include security products, services, or platforms that provide security functions and capabilities, such as encryption, authentication, monitoring, or incident response. You should also ensure that your security solutions are integrated, interoperable, and scalable and that they support the security architecture standards and guidelines that you have defined.

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5 Monitor and review your security performance

The final step is to monitor and review your security performance and compliance on a regular basis. You should use security metrics and indicators to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your security solutions, as well as the compliance level of your organization. Use security audits and assessments to verify and validate your security posture and identify any deviations or issues that need to be corrected. You should also update your security objectives and architecture as needed, to reflect the changes and trends in your environment.

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How do you keep up with the latest security architecture trends and innovations, such as cloud, AI, or IoT?

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1 Define your security objectives

2 Assess your security posture

3 Design your security architecture

4 Implement your security solutions

5 Monitor and review your security performance

Security Architecture Design

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