What is Security Architecture?
What is Security Architecture?
Security architecture is the strategic design of policies, technologies, and processes that help to protect and secure an organization's assets. Securing assets and systems reduces cyber risk, improves business continuity during an event, and speeds recovery efforts. A security architecture that aligns with business objectives and compliance requirements is a key pillar of the modern organization.
Why is security architecture important?
Security architecture provides a structured approach to cybersecurity, enabling the prevention, detection, and response to security events.
A well-designed security architecture includes security controls, policies, and technologies to strengthen your cybersecurity strategy. Security architects implement frameworks, design patterns, tools, and processes to increase an organization's security posture.
What are the benefits of a strong security architecture?
Organizations implement security architecture to operate and develop more confidently across both cloud and on-premises environments. An effective security architecture helps safeguard networks, applications, endpoints, and other digital assets from unauthorized access.
In business, implementing a strong security architecture reduces data risks and increases compliance with cybersecurity and data privacy laws. Each organization has unique security requirements. Therefore, security architects tailor the architecture to meet specific security goals, resource configurations, and business needs.
As a result, organizations are more responsive to existing and emerging cyber threats, evolving compliance laws, and customer expectations on data privacy. By combining security tools and practices, you can reduce downtime, improve business continuity in critical services, and recover more quickly from security incidents.
What are some components of security architecture?
A robust security architecture, by design, improves the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data, systems, and services. The architecture strategically combines tools, frameworks, and other security best practices.
Confidentiality
Confidentiality helps prevent unauthorized access to organizational data. Security teams use data protection methods such as encryption, access controls, and private communications to maintain confidentiality. This way, only users with legitimate permission can access sensitive data.
Integrity
Integrity refers to data remaining unaltered as information passes through various systems. To help prevent tampering, security teams apply techniques such as data validation, digital signatures, and checksums.
Availability
Availability is making data and services accessible to users while considering all aspects of security requirements. Disaster recovery, data replication, and fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure all help improve availability during security events.
Authentication and authorization
Authentication helps to ensure that only approved users can access protected resources. When users log in, the system validates their credentials through authentication systems, which can include biometrics and passwords, before granting access.
Authorization provides access to the corporate network, data, and services based on a user's role and responsibilities. Security teams use methods like role-based access control (RBAC) and the principle of least privilege to determine the scope of access.
Auditing and logging
Audit logs provide time-based evidence for analyzing, refining, and scaling cybersecurity architecture implementations. They assist security teams in investigating incidents, enhancing existing measures, and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.
Network security
Network security includes proactive measures to prevent, identify, and mitigate unauthorized access to a protected network. Security teams deploy solutions such as intrusion detection systems, virtual private networks, network segmentation, and web application firewalls to enforce network security.
Endpoint security
Endpoint security helps protect computers, servers, virtual machines, and other devices on the network from malicious programs and signs of exploits. Endpoint security solutions can automatically scan devices for vulnerabilities, apply patches, and report suspicious activities for further investigations.
Application security
Application security focuses on secure coding practices, vulnerability analysis, and software testing to reduce security risks in the production environment. To resolve vulnerabilities early, software developers perform code reviews, penetration testing, dependency vetting, and other automated security practices.
What are some common security architecture patterns?
Security architecture patterns are standardized practices that help security teams consistently implement best practices and scalable defense measures. These are common examples.
Defense in depth
Defense in depth adds multiple layers of security measures to protect an organization from internal and external threats. It aims to reduce threats at a deeper layer if the outer layer fails. For example, security teams need users to set a strong password as a first layer of protection. Then, they strengthen the defense by adding an anti-malware program, a secure gateway, automated patch management, and disaster recovery solutions.
Secure by design
Secure by design is a design pattern that embeds cybersecurity throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). By embedding security solutions from the beginning of a software project, rather than only in post-development testing, this reduces system vulnerabilities and the time spent on remediation.
Zero trust
Zero trust is a security model centered on the idea that access to data should not be solely made based on network location. It requires users and systems to strongly prove their identities and trustworthiness, and enforces fine-grained identity-based authorization rules before allowing them to access applications, data, and other systems.
With zero trust, these identities often operate within highly flexible identity-aware networks that further reduce surface area, eliminate unneeded pathways to data, and provide straightforward outer security guardrails.
API design
Software applications use an application programming interface (API) to exchange data with third-party services. API design is the process of developing, testing, and deploying an API. When designing an API, developers use various methods to help secure internal software data from public exposure. For example, APIs can require verification to authenticate and validate a third-party app before establishing a secure communication channel.
Encryption at rest and in transit
Encryption scrambles data so that only an authorized receiver can read it. By encrypting data at the application, network, and storage layers, you can help protect data privacy and reduce the risk of incidents.
What are some common security architecture frameworks?
Cybersecurity architects use these frameworks to guide their strategies, implementations, and principles in securing digital assets.
OWASP Top Ten
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top Ten is a list of common security vulnerabilities in web applications. Security architects and developers use the list to benchmark their applications against security threats. The list provides guidelines and examples of how to mitigate the threats when developing apps.
NIST Cybersecurity Framework
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework is a set of voluntary guidelines produced by the US government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology that helps organizations assess and manage security risks. It provides a security implementation that organizations across industries can adopt to strengthen their cyber resilience. Security teams design their cybersecurity strategy and architecture across six core functions: Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover.
ISO 27001
ISO 27001 is an international security standard produced by the International Standards Organization that provides guidelines for defining, operating, improving, and implementing security solutions for information management. You can obtain ISO 27001 certification as evidence of your commitment to safeguarding customer data.
AWS Security Reference Architecture
The AWS Security Reference Architecture (SRA) provides guidelines for using AWS services to enhance the security of AWS cloud environments. With AWS SRA, software architects can align their cloud workloads with practices recommended by AWS and meet their organization's security goals.
What are some common security architecture tools?
Organizations use security architecture tools to help protect sensitive data, enable timely incident response, and help mitigate potential threats.
Security information and event management (SIEM)
Security information and event management (SIEM) systems analyze activities from computers, applications, and systems in an organizational environment for suspicious activities. By consolidating this data, SIEM provides real-time threat intelligence, enabling a team to respond promptly to potential incidents.
Identity and access management (IAM)
Identity and access management (IAM) is a security tool that provides users access to systems, data, and applications. An IAM solution verifies a user's identity by matching their credentials with internal systems and then grants access based on the resource permissions assigned to the user.
Automated vulnerability management
A vulnerability scanner is a security solution that helps you detect security issues in your networks, computers, and applications. Security architects use vulnerability scanning to identify security gaps such as coding flaws, zero-day vulnerabilities, and network misconfigurations.
Endpoint detection and response (EDR)
Endpoint detection and response (EDR) is a type of endpoint security software that continuously monitors devices such as routers, virtual machines, and computers on a corporate network. If the EDR software detects abnormal behaviors, malicious programs, or unauthorized access attempts, it can initiate an automatic response or inform security teams.
Cloud security posture management (CSPM)
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) allows you to assess, detect, and remediate security risks in multi-cloud environments. CSPM provides a holistic overview of cloud security across the organization, including a security posture score. Organizations use CSPM as part of the shared responsibility model when deploying, managing, and innovating workloads on the cloud.
How can you choose the best security architecture?
You can improve your cyber resilience with a comprehensive security architecture. However, the exact security policies, tools, and frameworks depend on your business goals, operational risks, and security objectives. Below are ways that help you choose an effective security architecture.
- Conduct a risk assessment to identify your organization's exposure to digital threats.
- Based on the findings, categorize assets according to their importance, particularly in terms of potential impact on customers, employees, and other stakeholders.
- Define your security requirements. They could include endpoint protection, regulatory compliance, network security, and incident response.
- Select suitable security tools, frameworks, policies, and resources to establish a robust security architecture. Ensure that the security framework you choose is adaptable to complex cloud environments and aligns with your business goals.
- Test the security architecture to help ensure the protection it enforces is effective against potential threats.
How can AWS help you build a strong security architecture?
AWS Cloud Security services align with best practices in security architecture design.
Amazon Detective helps security teams triangulate security findings, investigate incidents with interactive visualizations, track down threats, and scale security investigations with generative AI.
Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability scanning and management service that automatically discovers workloads, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, container images, and AWS Lambda functions, as well as code repositories, and scans them for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure.
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a complete IAM solution for secure management of identities and access to AWS services and resources. AWS IAM allows you to set permission guardrails and fine-grained access, use temporary security credentials, and analyze IAM policies as you move towards least privilege.
AWS Security Hub performs security best practice checks and ingests security findings from AWS security services and partners. It combines these results with findings from other services and partner security tools, offering automated checks against your AWS resources to help identify misconfigurations and evaluate your cloud security posture.
Get started with implementing your security architecture on AWS by creating a free account today.