Running head: Logical Security Architecture 1

SABSA-Based Physical Security Architecture

G. Logan Gombar

University of San Diego

Ms. Michelle Moore

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SABSA-Based Physical Security Architecture

The SABSA architecture dictates that the fifth layer is focused on the physical security

architecture, diving into the details of how things should be implemented. This moves beyond

the theoretical context and into the concrete reality of the implementation (Sherwood, 2005). A

key point of designing the architecture at this more tangible level is a focus on redundancy and

resilience. This report will discuss several principles dedicated to resilience, some best practice

approaches, and several methods to keep business platforms running in the event of problems.

General Resilience Principles

Resilience can be achieved by following at least one of the principles in the following

section. Ideally, multiple overlapping methods would ensure the greatest redundancy possible.

One of the most obvious ideas is to avoid single points of failure as much as possible. Preventing

the reliance on a single method of delivering a business service enables the company to continue

running should something traumatic occur. The specifics of can be applied with multi-path cables

(discussed further below) and with another principle – hardware redundancy and failover

procedures. Having procedures in place to deal with the inevitable hardware failures is crucial to

business success. Having an outage is okay, so long as there is a secondary system to spin up and

take on the customer traffic. Additionally, having on-demand systems to spin up in the event of a

dramatic increase in demand on the application enables far greater revenue for the business, an

ideal solution for security as well as program management. A final principle for increasing

network resilience is implementing automated data backups and recovery systems. By

implementing these in hot, warm, and cold sites, the company can ensure a minimum level of

resiliency in the event of data loss or corruption.

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Approaches to Network Resilience

Given the above principles are vague and nebulous in nature, the application portion

comes from the approaches available. Implementing the principle of avoiding single points of

failure can easily be done with multi-path cabling to avoid a single line being the backbone of

the company. If a piece of construction equipment severs that cable, there is no recourse beyond

immediately working to repair that line. If there were multiple lines leaving the building

providing backup service, there would still be an issue but it wouldn’t put the company in such

dire straits – service can be provided to the customers still. Further applications of increased

resilience can be achieved through regular testing of all systems to determine their next possible

failure point. Maintaining logs of when the last failure of a given system occurred, and

comparing them to their mean time between failures from their manuals, and predicting the next

failure and testing those systems regularly while making the purchase requests to replace the near

end-of-life equipment can create a very reliable system and resilient network.

Platform Resilience

Moving on from network resilience is to move to a discussion on platform and

application resilience. The easiest way to provide application resilience is through a layered

approach, as is typical with most security and resilience efforts. For instance, a simple way to

provide simultaneously a high level of availability and a fantastically responsive application

speed is to keep multiple geographically disparate processing datacenters. This provides a myriad

of exceptional qualities to the service provided by the business – rapid application response

times, high levels of resilience due to the ability to sustain extremely damaging events at

individual datacenters without experiencing complete application losses, and a level of data

backups if the data is replicated in near real-time across the enterprise. This provides a level of
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resilience not only through availability, but also through data integrity due to the regular

propagation of the data across the network. This level of resilience is integral to the business

perspective as it provides a crucial level of financial income required to validate the expenses

associated with the security and resilience efforts. Furthering this effort is the potential for local

RAID storage efforts. This endeavor can be directly in line with the hot/warm/cold backup

efforts already in place, given the types of RAID possible. Implementing a RAID-10

configuration enables the greatest parity and backup possibility.

Summary

Resilience is key and crucial. The business driver here is consistent income through

continual uptime through resilience and redundancy. Implementing a number of general

principles creates a standard of resilience. Performing a number of proper approaches to network

security and redundancy can increase the business profit of any network through more regular

customer interactions. The performance of a network directly drives the profit of a company

these days, and therefore the resiliency of a network drives the profit of company. For this

reason, it is critical for the information assurance and business personnel to work hand in hand.
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References

Sherwood, N. A. (2005). Enterprise security architecture: A business-driven approach. CRC Press.