Secure By Design
Learn more about the best practices, benefits and importance of Secure by Design, as well as Nexor’s approach.
What is Secure by Design?
Secure by Design is embedding security from the outset in the systems and infrastructure lifecycle. This takes a holistic and comprehensive approach to risk management, applying appropriate and proportionate controls, ensuring resilience and policy compliance. Its adoption is underpinned by a proactive approach to threat management, secure supply chains and continuous testing.
Why is Secure by Design important?
Secure by Design is critical for safeguarding an organisation’s long-term success, especially where risk tolerance is minimal. By embedding security from the outset, organisations minimise risks and reduce costly retrofitting or introducing risk by compromising on mitigations. This approach ensures that sensitive data and operations are protected against the evolving cyber threats facing their domain.
Successful implementation means less operational disruption, more resilient operations and greater trust from stakeholders. Adopting a principled approach to Secure by Design helps organisations meet regulatory requirements, mitigating the risk of the risk of compliance penalties. It furthers strength in the supply chain, ensuring that partners adhere to necessary security standards.
Proactively addressing security fosters operational efficiency and reduces the attack surface introduced by vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. Continuous testing and resilience measures guarantee faster recovery from potential incidents, preserving organisational reputation and sustaining continuity of operations.
What are the Secure by Design principles and best practices?
Secure by Design principles, as promoted by the National Cyber Security Centre and aligned with the National Institute of Standards and Technology standards, ensure that security is embedded across networks, hardware, software and services. This approach minimises costly vulnerabilities, enhances operational resilience and ensures long-term compliance.
In networks, defence in depth and risk management prevent breaches by layering firewalls, encryption and monitoring tools. For hardware, ensuring secure components from trusted suppliers and applying appropriate physical security measures mitigates risks of tampering or attacks at the infrastructure level.
In software, practices like least privilege access, regular patching and secure coding standards minimise the attack surface from insider risks and external threats. Services, especially those involving sensitive data, must adhere to strong authentication, encryption and continuous monitoring.
Ensuring resilience across all elements – networks, hardware, software and services – enables quick recovery from potential threats. This holistic approach reduces downtime, builds trust and future-proofs the organisation against the evolving cyber threat landscape.
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Learn about Secure By Design from our free brochure. Simply tell us where to send it and we will email it to your inbox.
Nexor’s Approach to Secure by Design
Security Assessment
Nexor provides a bespoke cyber security assessment service tailored to the needs of your organisation, considering your threats, vulnerabilities and risks and your ability to mitigate them. Leading on from the assessment, Nexor’s consultants will provide mitigation advice and develop security improvement plans to help you move forward. Security Assessment Services can range from supporting major Defence and Government programmes as domain specialists to a short threat/risk assessment for a small organisation.
Secure By Design Delivery
Nexor can secure your business from the ground up with a Secure By Design strategy that seamlessly integrates security at every stage of project and capability development. Leveraging proven frameworks (such as the NIST Cyber Security Framework), we help you identify risks, protect critical assets and build resilience with a robust structured process. From risk identification to incident response and recovery, our advisory services can elevate your security capability.
Our approach goes beyond a structured process to navigate dynamic and evolving security requirements. Our advisory services can adapt to Agile project management to ensure that risks are understood in line with project evolution enabling a shift-left approach that elevates security from the outset. Our ability to quickly calibrate to project requirements enables appropriate snapshots of existing and evolving risks to improve mitigation of risk throughout the capability development lifecycle.
This hybrid strategy ensures a proactive security posture, helping minimise costly delays and ensuring resilience in a persistently evolving cyber security landscape.
Supply Chain Assessment
As Supply Chain attacks become more frequent, it is important that you understand the risk to operations if your Supply chain is targeted to gain access to sensitive information relating to components of your solutions or services.
Nexor can extend the Security Assessment to include your Supply Chain, mapping your solution bill of materials or end-to-end service onto your Supply Chain to assess again your defined security standards and policies to identify any vulnerabilities and risks associated with it. Each part of that supply chain will be assessed to then build a complete picture of your supply chain.
What are the benefits of Secure by Design?
Proactively embedding Secure By Design delivers:
Reduced business and operational risk
Proactive risk identification and mitigation reduces the chance of system failure or disruption through security incidents. Operational outcomes can be more easily anticipated and lowers the potential cost of downtime or breaches. This cost-effective approach ensures security investment is operationally efficiently aligned with business strategy while also safeguarding assets.
Resilient software development
Assimilating security ensures vulnerabilities are addressed during design and not post-deployment. This enhances assurance and compliance, reduces the likelihood of future breaches and the need for costly patches or emergency fixes.
Robust application security
Secure application development reduces the potential for exploitation – preventing malicious actors from undermining the reliable operation of critical systems.
Data integrity and protection
Ensuring appropriate protection for data throughout its lifecycle is critical. This minimises the risk of unauthorised access, data breaches or leaks and ensuring compliant safeguarding of sensitive data.
Improved network resilience
Designing in security fortifies networks against cyber threats, enhancing compromise detection to ensure critical communications and data remain protected from disruption and improving operational continuity.
Enhanced hardware security
Integrating security into hardware components from the outset minimises vulnerabilities at the physical level, reducing the risk of tampering or unauthorised access to ensure mission-critical systems are protected.
Download your free copy of the benefits sheet
Learn about Secure By Design from our free brochure. Simply tell us where to send it and we will email it to your inbox.
Secure by Design FAQs
Integrating Secure by Design can be challenging due to resistance to change within teams, the potential initial increase in costs and the need for subject matter expertise. Aligning security protocols with existing processes and ensuring integration across a multitude of stakeholders can also complicate implementation. Balancing security with usability while maintaining agility in developmental cycles is critical as an overly stringent approach may hinder improvements and operational efficiency.
Your business needs Secure by Design to proactively mitigate risks and safeguard critical assets from the outset. Secure by Design enhances assurance in protecting your assets and minimising costly risks to your reputation. Embedding security into your developmental processes ensures resilience against evolving threats, maintaining operational continuity and instilling trust and confidence in stakeholders. This ultimately fosters a robust security posture that aligns with your goals and protects your assets in today’s dynamic landscape.
The best Secure by Design strategy involves adopting a ‘Secure by Default’ mindset, ensuring that security measures are automatically implemented in systems and applications in a proportionate and operationally effective manner. This includes thorough threat modelling, integrating security testing throughout the development lifecycle and fostering a culture of security awareness among operational teams. Regularly updating and patching systems, along with continuous monitoring further strengthens this approach, creating a robust defence against potential threats and vulnerabilities to ensure an effective security programme.
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