Here's how you can design secure and resilient system architectures by leveraging your creativity.

Designing a resilient & secured system architectures needs a forward thinking mindset & creativity plays crucial role to develop SA that is strongly aligned to the business vision. Though baseline systems & reference model are available for numerous problems, but these are not just sufficient due to rapid evolution. Set the Goals that support & align to the business vision, this help to determine & carve out necessities that are needed to build a secured & resilient SA. Security needs deeper psychological thinking, this is where creativity will play significant role. Employing techniques such as SCAMPER will help to think creatively & stand unique. Clarity, Transparency & Authenticity are a few traits to be considered in the design process.

There is a perspective that we all need to address, and it is legal compliance. When designing an architecture, it needs to be flexible, secure and possible to harden further. This also means to classify your information, define access and retention policies and just as important, purging policies. Among a lot of other things

DoDAF architectures are designed to be flexible. At one of my employers, we modified the SV-5 to map goals to capabilities, capabilities to operational activity, operational activity to system, systems to system functions to get a picture of what systems were actually fulfilling the top level goals of the organization. Being creative with your solutions and developing a layered approach to ensure that security and redundancy are taken into account. Imagine worst case scenario and plan for that.

Designing secure and resilient system architectures requires a creative approach that integrates security best practices and resilience principles. It is important to identify and evaluate risks: - Use creativity to imagine threat scenarios and identify potential vulnerabilities in the system. - Adopts an innovative approach to assess risks and predict possible attack scenarios, taking into account emerging and unconventional threats. By leveraging creativity, you can design secure, resilient system architectures that can adapt to emerging challenges and effectively protect data and business assets.

Develop a layered defense approach to enhance security and resilience in system architectures. Incorporate multiple security layers, such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and encryption, to create a robust defense against attacks. Innovate by integrating advanced threat intelligence and real-time monitoring to anticipate and mitigate risks proactively. Use a combination of hardware and software solutions to provide comprehensive protection. Implement strict access controls and continuous auditing to ensure compliance and detect vulnerabilities. Regularly update and diversify your defense strategies to stay ahead of emerging threats and maintain a secure, resilient architecture.

Implementing best practices from the initial setup, with proper access controls, and continuous monitoring will minimise risks in your architecture. This ensures each defense layer is effectively implemented and maintained, creating a robust and resilient security posture.

Implement innovative redundancy plans to enhance system security and resilience. Develop multiple failover mechanisms that go beyond traditional backup systems, ensuring continuous operation during failures. Use creative approaches such as geo-redundancy, where data and services are duplicated across multiple geographical locations, to mitigate risks of localized disruptions. Consider diverse redundancy strategies, like active-active clustering, where multiple servers are running simultaneously to handle loads and failures. Regularly test and refine these redundancy plans to adapt to evolving threats and ensure robust, uninterrupted service delivery.

Design of such system can have several approaches 1 per accident, where you know that is happens and develop such mechanisms to recover 2 preventable, where you trying to input in the system as much as possible to prevent accidents from happens 3 don’t care, where the system designed the way that none of the accidents can take it down.

Redundancy is so much more than just recovery of data. One needs to ensure that the data backed up actually can be restored, that you know how long it will take you to start up a completely new site/cloud environment, redundancy is a small part of business survival.

Simplicity is key. The simpler a system, the less attack surface it has, the easier it is to analyze for vulnerability, the easier it is to maintain and keep up to date. It's worth to question features. Some might be redundant and can be merged. Some might solve a problem that could have been avoided in the first. Some might just be there because they have always been there. Getting rid of them is the better invest compared to adding yet another onion layer.

Incorporate creative problem-solving to design secure and resilient system architectures. Begin by thinking beyond traditional security measures, exploring innovative encryption methods and authentication techniques. Integrate redundant systems and failover mechanisms creatively to enhance resilience. Encourage the team to brainstorm potential vulnerabilities and novel ways to mitigate them. Use threat modeling creatively to anticipate and address security challenges. Stay informed about emerging technologies and adapt them creatively to improve system security and resilience. By leveraging creativity, you can build robust architectures that are both secure and resilient.

Have a management plan in place. A plan that is continuously updated and rehearsed. And make sure the executive management team is involved in the process.