Enterprise Security Architecture (ESA) Principles Overview
This paper explains SABSA®’s Principles for Enterprise Security Architecture, reveals the most common client mistakes we encounter, and demonstrates how we at David Lynas Consulting use this structure to drive practical and meaningful practices to benefit Security Architects and the Enterprises they serve.
Many frameworks and standards include Security Architecture Principles, but for practitioners at the sharp end who must deal with ‘here and now’ challenges, they are often perceived as inconsequential and impractical. They play a vital role in framing the context (the “Why” to do) to ensure that we are fully tuned into and focused on that business context when defining practices to design solutions (the “What” to do).
This paper introduces the SABSA Principles, Advantages & Benefits Framework (PAB), which transposes Principles into a model of specific benefits in a stakeholder context.
The results of a Principles exercise can be leveraged for contextualisation analysis to define adoptable, practical, security capabilities, practices and architecture artefacts that are highly tuned to and driven by client success factors. In turn, these can be used to drive, articulate, design and operationalise architecture artefacts.