Enterprise architecture management risk

More about this item Statistics Access and download statistics Corrections All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:igg:jisss0:vyip See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

We are searching data for your request:

Enterprise architecture management risk

Content:

• Diagnosing Risk: Enterprise Architects in the Modern Organization – Part 3
• Conceptual Integration of Enterprise Architecture Management and Security Risk Management
• A Risk Integration Framework for the Service-Oriented Enterprise
• How to Improve Cyber Security with Enterprise Architecture
• How Spar Nord Bank built a business architecture to handle risk and compliance
• Uncovering and Overcoming Cybersecurity Risks with Enterprise Architecture
• Enterprise Architecture Solutions
• TOGAF Security Guide Risk

Diagnosing Risk: Enterprise Architects in the Modern Organization – Part 3

It is no secret that cybersecurity threats are ever increasing. It is sometimes said there are only two kinds of organizations: those who know they have been breached, and those who do not know it yet. To mitigate the risk and damage associated with cybersecurity, it is important to know how to assess these risks and improve your defenses via security-by-design.

It is also important to plan for what to do if and when things do go sideways. So, let us have a look at some important steps that you can take to effectively manage risk and stay as safe as possible in this dangerous world. Ensure enterprise-wide awareness In most organizations, upper-level management awareness of cyber threats has increased due to the many high-profile incidents over the last few years. The cost associated with ransomware, data breaches and other issues can easily reach in the hundreds of millions.

But too often, many still see cybersecurity as a technical issue, to be dealt with by the IT director and his or her underlings. One sure way to wake up the boardroom to cybersecurity awareness is regulatory compliance.

In these instances, management can be held personally responsible for non-compliance, so there is a strong incentive to act. But often, management feel like deer in the headlights when it comes to cyber threats. They see the danger but do not know what to do in the face of these threats. The breadth and depth of these issues may indeed seem incomprehensible and unsolvable. To help management overcome such paralysis, you must present solutions, not just problems.

Enterprise architects are uniquely positioned to provide these. We will address the issue of talking to stakeholders on security in more detail a bit further down the line. Align security and risk management with business strategy To spend your money wisely, you will need to invest in security where it really counts — that is, where it is strategically important.

You should, therefore, classify your assets according to their strategic importance, considering regulatory compliance and other guidelines. What are these assets worth, not just in financial terms but in a broader sense? For example, protecting valuable intellectual property or privacy-sensitive data may be crucial for your business continuity or essential from a regulatory compliance perspective.

Such a classification helps you decide on investment priorities and avoid spending too much on protecting unimportant assets or blanket measures. Unfortunately, many organizations do not have a clear connection between their strategy and assets. Analyze your vulnerabilities and risks Cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, using a combination of digital, physical, and social engineering techniques.

An employee picks it up, and chances are that he will not be able to suppress his curiosity and plug it into his PC. Surprise: the drive is infected with malware that infects the PC and sends sensitive information to the intruder.

You must take an integral approach to defend against such attacks, incorporating all aspects of your enterprise, including personnel education, processes, and procedures, as well as technical measures like firewalls and antivirus software. Moreover, you should look at this from the perspective of your business goals and strategy, as mentioned before.

This is why the ability to capture and visualize the various risk and security aspects of your organization is so important. It helps you get a better grasp of hazards, risks, and mitigation measures in relation to your overall architecture, business strategy and assets so you can perform a true strategy- and value-based risk and compliance assessment. You can measure and visualize the potential impact of these risks and use these insights to prioritize investments in mitigating measures as part of the next step.

Take a security-by-design approach Vulnerabilities should not be fixed after the fact, especially not by just slapping on some ad-hoc security measures like an extra firewall. Rather than defining a separate security architecture, you should develop a secure architecture and address risks proactively in the architecture and design across all levels of your enterprise, from people and responsibilities to processes and technology. Having your own house in order may not be enough. For instance, if you rely extensively on some external partner, their security may be business-critical for your own operations.

Some organizations try to rely on contracts and agreements to take care of this, but that may be insufficient. Legally, you may be held responsible for a breach at, say, an outsourcing partner. Regulation such as the GDPR explicitly states that your organization remains liable for the processing of privacy-sensitive data, even if you hire someone else to do that for you.

In some cases, you may even need to have your business partners audited to remain compliant. In a security-by-design approach, you prioritize investments in security based on the value of your assets and the vulnerabilities you have found in the previous steps. You calculate the business value and impact of security projects and use this to make a prioritization of IT measures. Our platform can help you clearly identify where to spend your budget most effectively, thanks to its enterprise portfolio management capabilities.

Creating contingency plans based on clear insights into the structure and operations of your enterprise is essential. Up-to-date models of your architecture, processes, systems, and data can be a tremendous help in assessing how far a problem could spread, and at which points you should act quickly to limit the impact of a security breach.

Connecting your enterprise architecture management suite with systems such as CMDBs, which administer and monitor operational reality, helps to ensure that you use the best and most timely data available.

An online portal represents a great solution in this case, especially if it features easy-to-use views and dashboards for different types of users, ranging from business decision makers to operational management, and people on the proverbial shop floor.

Of course, you cannot achieve absolute security. Rather, you should focus on where you need to invest from the perspective of 1 the value of the assets you want to protect and 2 the vulnerabilities associated with these assets. Personally, I believe the best approach to enterprise risk and security management ERSM is to rely on several open standards, most notably the ArchiMate standard for enterprise architecture modeling, as well as the Open FAIR standard for information risk management.

Figure 1: The steps to our approach to enterprise risk and security management. Figure 1 shows the main steps of this approach. At the bottom of the image you see the assets you want to protect from cyber risks, while at the top we see the policies, principles and objectives that direct the organization.

In between are the steps that connect these. On the left side in red , you see the analysis of cyber risk in your organization. On the right side in green you see the implementation of controls to improve your security. These are the steps of risk and security management:.

Review assets What are the most important assets that are critical to your enterprise? What do applicable regulations say about these assets? For example, the personal data of your customers may be one such asset. Your reputation as a trustworthy organization may be another. Can you put a value to these elements? That will help you later when deciding what is most important to protect.

But you should investigate other vulnerabilities you can recognize and link these to the assets they expose. You can reuse the models of your business and IT architecture, augmenting them with relevant security aspects. Throughout the years I have compiled an extensive model containing hundreds of common vulnerabilities, threat agents and threat events, which can serve as a starting point for your analysis in this and the previous step. Calculate risk Based on potential threats and the value of your assets, you can assess the risks your enterprise faces.

Figure 2 shows an example of such an analysis, gradually built up in these first four steps. The upper part shows:. Figure 2: Risk analysis example. The traffic lights show various parameters, such as the asset value, vulnerability level and the resulting risk level.

All these are connected, and our risk analysis algorithm calculates the results, e. Create policies To deal proactively with potential cyber risks, you should define appropriate security policies and principles that are in line with your business strategy and follow applicable regulations.

This may, for example, include principles such as security-by-design, separation of duties, restricted access to personal data and other common policies. Regulatory frameworks like the GDPR demand solid data protection policies, with hefty fines for non-compliance and even personal liability of responsible management.

This, in turn, influences the value of the assets you want to protect. It is not just their intrinsic value at stake — fines, reputational damage and other side effects should also be taken into account. Define control objectives Based on the policies you created in the last step, you should now define the right control objectives. One standard approach is to classify the confidentiality, integrity, availability, privacy-sensitivity, and other attributes of your data, according to common use cases you have.

For instance, data on your website will need low confidentiality but high availability, while customer data will have much higher privacy and confidentiality requirements, while availability might be less of a concern. Create control measures These control objectives are then translated into applicable control measures, which tell you what to do to achieve these objectives. Figure 4 shows a set of controls from the CSA standard, applicable to encryption.

Implementation The last step is to design the implementation of these control measures as part of your own architecture, processes, and systems. For example, you will need to figure out how you implement encryption and key management the measures from Figure 4. You can compare the cost of implementing these measures with the risks you run.

Are they worth it, or are you protecting low-value assets with overly expensive controls? The analysis shown above is, of course, done by modeling and risk assessment experts and may look complicated to the uninitiated. However, you can present the results in user-friendly heatmaps like the one in Figure 5.

The heatmap in Figure 5 shows how high capability of threats e. The other two vulnerabilities in this heatmap are less urgent. This analysis helps management prioritize investments in improving security like, in this example, implementing rules on password length or instituting multi-factor authentication. Thus, your organization has room in its budget to invest where it really counts. Remember that security architecture is a continuous concern.

Risk management, too, is a continuous, iterative process. In fact, various regulatory frameworks require you to have such a risk management process. There is no guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong. To begin with, is it really necessary to communicate about risk and security architecture? And if so, to whom? And what? Well, communication is in fact integral to the process, and you should think of decision-makers as your target audience, since the business needs to be well-informed if it is to make the right decisions.

As enterprise architects trying to build in cybersecurity processes and standards, you need to involve and inform not just management, but the rest of the organization as well.

Conceptual Integration of Enterprise Architecture Management and Security Risk Management

It is very challenging to use wordpress Latex plugin to write mathematical article in wordpress. It is not impossible but it is very challenging and realized it in my attempt to write the explanation of Schrodinger equation. My attempt to explain the basics of Gabor transformation and step wise proof that Gabor functions holds the minimum uncertainty in the joint time frequency domains. Please click the following link for the details. In the paper, the top most of list is enterprise architect.

A Risk Integration Framework for the Service-Oriented Enterprise

Leveraging a centralized repository for this information helps empower decision makers with a clear view of all information driving their program. Architex provides a modular approach to managing the different workflows required to capture and maintain all aspects of data needed for making informed decisions. This approach allows each individual group to stay within their respective workflow while providing decision makers the ability to correlate and understand all aspects of the data to make informed decisions. Leveraging a centralized repository to host and maintain all data ensures all groups have access to and work with the most current information available. ENSCO views architectural evolution through the lens of affordability, and we developed Architex to address the complex balance between the Technical Trades associated with architectural objectives, driving requirements and topologies and the Programmatic Trades associated with an investment-driven roadmap, budgetary limitations and risk. If enterprise objectives are not affordable, decision makers have three options that can be traded within Architex: reduce enterprise objectives, slip the implementation schedule or accept a higher level of risk. Architex can identify those requirements that disproportionately drive costs and budgetary requirements.

How to Improve Cyber Security with Enterprise Architecture

Welcome to October, Cybersecurity Awareness Month! Unfortunately, we all tend to believe our department is the most important, and this self-focus creates space for miscommunication between platform players. Meanwhile, the Enterprise Architects EAs are thinking it would be so much better if everyone spoke the same language. However, each team understands the warnings in headline news. For example, saw the highest average cost of data breaches : data breach costs rose from USD 3.

How Spar Nord Bank built a business architecture to handle risk and compliance

Spending on security and risk management is soaring worldwide. But exactly which improvements should you focus on next to best strengthen your cybersecurity program? For many organizations, building a solid information security architecture should be at the top of the list. Read on to learn how what information security architecture is and how it can help you protect your critical IT assets from security threats with less work and worry. A simple way to define enterprise information security architecture EISA is to say it is the subset of enterprise architecture EA focused on securing company data. This information is provided in the context of organizational requirements, priorities, risk tolerance and related factors, to help ensure the EISA reflects both current and future business needs.

Uncovering and Overcoming Cybersecurity Risks with Enterprise Architecture

Everything we do has an upside and downside. Risk architecture tells us to minimize the uncertainty of reaching our objectives. SABSA Domain models simplify your stakeholders' decision making and ensure good architecture governance. Each domain shares a risk appetite and decision authority. It clarifies who expects benefits and owns the downside. Risk Architecture uses these words, without meaning threat. Risk management is about managing uncertainty.

Enterprise Architecture Solutions

Information Risk Management Program Services provide consultation services that assist clients in the University of Toronto community to develop their capacity for managing information risk specific to their needs and position. Whether the scope is a specific project, application, unit or division or attaining compliance with the U of T Policy on the Protection of Digital Assets, we can help you get where you need to be. Depending on the full scope of your need, we offer three main services, as shown in the tabs to the left.

TOGAF Security Guide Risk

Privacy is our priority. We do not sell or otherwise share personal information for money or anything of value. We use strictly necessary cookies to enable site functionality and improve the performance of our website. We also store cookies to personalize the website content and to serve more relevant content to you. For more information please visit our Privacy Policy or Cookie Policy.

Processes were localised within different business departments, and even within individual teams. It also made it difficult to maintain. In order to transform its business and ensure compliance, solutions to provide an overview of how the organisation functions and interconnects were needed. This would create a standardised approach for documenting processes across the entire business. Processes from more teams and departments were added over time until every division of the bank had mapped its processes into a common language.

The purpose of this paper is to ease the ISO standard understanding and provide mechanisms that allow organizations to adopt and adapt this standard to their reality. Key finding is that enterprise architecture EA models and EA tools can help reduce the complexity of the ISO standard and improve the communication between stakeholders. The research proposal serves the purpose of supporting the evidence collection for an enterprise risk management ERM initiative in an as-was, as-is, or to-be perspective. Traditional ERM efforts operate on silos, limiting the sharing of risk information and the achievement of an organization-wide view of risks.