Perspectives on secure-by-design.
Working notes, opinions and field-tested patterns on zero trust, cloud security and the craft of designing systems that are defensible by construction — not by luck. Written for architects and engineers who have to make the trade-offs, not just talk about them.
All writing
SABSA as the foundation: security architecture that starts with the business
Business attributes, risk and opportunity, and two-way traceability — the spine every other framework hangs off.
Security is a design property, not a control count
Moving from a shopping list of controls to failure modes that simply don't exist by construction.
Mapping controls to frameworks without drowning in them
SABSA, NIST CSF 2.0, SP 800-53 and the CIS Controls as one traceable chain — from business need to risk to evidence.
Landing zones: getting the guardrails right on day one
What AWS and Azure Well-Architected agree should be in place before the first workload lands.
UK Secure by Design: ten principles on a SABSA spine
The UK government's mandatory policy mapped onto SABSA layers — and where it stops covering the CAF.
The CAF and NIS2: one architecture, two regulatory regimes
The NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework and the EU NIS2 Directive side by side — build once, evidence twice.
Zero trust is an architecture, not a product you buy
What "never trust, always verify" actually means once you have to draw the boxes and arrows.
Threat modelling that engineers actually use
STRIDE without the ceremony — keeping the model small enough to stay true, useful enough to change the design.
Identity is the real perimeter
Federation, conditional access and workload identity as the control plane everything else hangs off.
New writing, occasionally.
No newsletter machine, no spam — just the occasional note when I have something worth saying about security architecture. Reach out if you want to compare notes.