Security For Enterprise Architecture – The Needs and Challenges
Hardly anyone in sales needs to fight for budget approval for a cloud-based CRM solution, yet many EA teams struggle to get similar approaches signed off. EA platforms are at the epicenter of enforcing digital transformation strategies, ensuring audit-ready compliance for regulations such as GDPR, and maintaining oversight of data security and privacy policy adherence across the organization. In today’s competitive markets, managers across all levels are required to make impactful decisions on a daily basis. Quite simply, the poorer the information available, or the more difficult it is to successfully analyze it, the higher the managerial risk. By splitting up architectural use cases into smaller subsets, data mapping, analysis, and validation can be easily distributed to domain experts. What’s more, most EA contributors won’t ever need to see or fully understand the EA platform interface, as both visual analysis and data collection can be brought to them using interfaces they already use.
What is Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise Architecture is a business concept that involves systematized planning, design, implementation, and execution of enterprise analysis in managing business strategies. Its focus lies in the comprehensive development of enterprises through a set of beliefs and principles that guide business operations. Through Enterprise Architecture, companies can plan for effective use of IT resources in developing their business strategies, either through furthering existing goals or guiding innovative methods towards a new venture.
Cybersecurity in Enterprise Architectures
Enterprise architecture provides a clear breakdown in asset distribution within the company, along with their respective vulnerabilities and the policies set in motion. Through enterprise risk and security management coupled with Open standards, enterprise architects are equipped to effectively identify cyber threats and accurately deploy security measures and protocols by aligning security and risk management with business strategies. Enterprise architecture allows these trained professionals to swiftly assess threats from malicious third-party sources, calculate risks based on asset value, and come up with control objectives that are implemented. Implementing security architecture is often a confusing process in enterprises.
Why Enterprise Security?
Enterprise architecture provides a clear breakdown in asset distribution within the company, along with their respective vulnerabilities and the policies set in motion. Through enterprise risk and security management coupled with Open standards, enterprise architects are equipped to effectively identify cyber threats and accurately deploy security measures and protocols by aligning security and risk management with business strategies. Enterprise architecture allows these trained professionals to swiftly assess threats from malicious third-party sources, calculate risks based on asset value, and come up with control objectives that are implemented. Implementing security architecture is often a confusing process in enterprises.
Enterprise and information security lies within two major goals of every business: earning a profit and satisfying their customers. When a cyberattack happens at a business, it can adversely impact both the company’s finances and customer relations. It can be uniquely challenging — and sometimes impossible — for customers to continue doing business with a company that did not take steps to protect their sensitive information. It’s no surprise that cybercriminals focus on small businesses, as they assume these companies do not have the same level of resources and security systems as larger corporations. They may also, believe small business owners are not as adept in dealing with cybersecurity systems and attacks, providing them with more time to access sensitive information.
Approach
- Protect the Weakest Link: Your security system is only as strong as its weakest link.
- Grant Permissions Conservatively: If you ever do have to provide a customer, client, employee, contractor, or another stakeholder with access to protected documents within your system, make sure you only provide them with the permissions they need.
- Be Cautious of Who You Trust: If something does go wrong with your system or servers, make sure a trusted individual at your company is responsible for communicating with your provider and figuring out what steps to take to correct it.
- Encourage Privacy: Another way you can maximize the value of your company’s enterprise security system is by encouraging your employees to follow fundamental best practices for internet privacy and security.
- It’s All About the Data: With enterprise applications, the data is more valuable than the apps that consume the data. This is because the datasets are large, and often go back decades. They’re mostly stored in SQL databases, but in recent times, in NoSQL alternatives as well. The data is multifaceted and can be presented in many different ways within a single application or across multiple applications. Because of how valuable this data is, attackers target access to data first and foremost. One look at the biggest recent data breaches confirms this. The Equifax data breach in 2017 resulted in the private details of 143 million customers being leaked. Additionally, 209,000 customers’ credit card data was exposed.
- Deeply Integrated with Other Apps: Enterprise applications need to talk to each other to function as they were meant to. Applications for each team are all separate but integrated for a more holistic view of the customer or employee.
- Legacy Apps Alongside Modern Apps: Enterprises are stuck in that awkward space between their legacy apps that just about get the job done and modern alternatives that go beyond the required task, and do it 10x faster with fewer resources.
- Security for Modern Cloud-Native Applications: Cloud-native applications, though more complex than legacy applications, can be much more secure if it’s done the right way.
- Kernel Security Features: The use of Services like Docker inheriting some core security features from Linux. These are features like namespaces, cgroups, AppArmor, SELinux, and Seccomp. They enforce isolation between containers, limit what a container can see, and how many resources a container can use.
- Secrets Management: With numerous components in a container stack, and each needs authorized access to the others, there is a lot of secure information like passwords, tokens, API keys, and more.
- Policy-Based Networking: Peripheral firewalls aren’t enough to secure networks for microservice applications. Instead, microservices use policy-based networking to secure each service. This way, even if one service is compromised, the others remain secure.
- Threat Detection: When running containerized apps in production, there are numerous access points through which vulnerabilities can enter the system. It’s impossible to manually crawl through logs to find breaches.
We can Help!
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