Section II: Architecture Issues

Chapter List

Chapter V: Architecture Issues

Section Overview

This section is focused on building the information security architecture, including the issues of what is important for executives and senior managers to consider about how to align the security, application and infrastructure architectures for maximum benefit. Additional discussion is provided concerning the construction of multiple protection barriers, determining internal security threats and performing disaster planning in worst-case scenarios.

Unfortunately, there is no boilerplate information security architecture plan that can be scaled up or down to meet the needs of every organization. Each organization has different information security requirements, unique financial constraints and individual risk tolerances and technical resources. A small e-commerce company may create a security plan that costs a million dollars that meets their needs, while a large government agency may spend $100 million and believe substantial security deficiencies remain to be remedied. Balancing these factors with customer and shareholder expectations is a difficult job, and all of these factors change frequently, often every day, as new threats become visible. However, it is clear that some commonalities do exist across most IT organizations, permitting leveraging of Best Practices frameworks.

Security architectures are often created in response to a known threat or anticipated situation. In most cases, proactive thinking across a wide spectrum of possible risks and threats is usually more cost effective than creating and applying single solutions that do not directly address collateral impacts or opportunities. The cost effectiveness comes from leveraging many points of security firewalls, updated OS patches, audit trails, role- based access, multi-level management access approvals , automated virus installations, etc. which can leverage each other to isolate and contain security breeches. The single point approach may be cheaper initially, but much more expensive should a number of different single point approaches be required to address multi-pronged types of attacks which is becoming more of the norm.

The Microsoft Exchange virus and worm attacks of the past four years indicates that having an adaptable, leveragable and agile security response capability was more effective than applying a monolithic or proprietary approach. Organizations that had single point security technologies or processes had to constantly replan their processes and technical staff to counter previously unknown threats and attacks that a single approach could not contain.

The first step in building a strong defense is to identify possible threats, their sources, and overall impact to the organization items found in the threat matrix model.