Business Context & Requirements

Question 1

What is Business-Driven Architecture ?

Answer 1

1. Never lose sight of the organisation’s goals, objectives, success factors and targets.
2. Ensuring that the security strategy demonstrably supports, enhances and protects them.
3. The contextual architecture captures and presents the full set of relevant requirements for the scope of the assignment.

Question 2

How to approach traceability.

Answer 2

• Good Traceability requires small, credible steps, not big jumps.
  1. Collect business drivers, goals and objectives.

2. Abstract them in business language into meaningful business drivers for security.
3. Meaningful traceability is enabled by credible abstraction from business context (Assets, goals and objectives) to a business security context.

Question 3

What are SABSA Business Attributes?

Answer 3

• An Attribute is a conceptual abstraction of a real business requirement. (The goals, objectives, drivers, targets and assets confirmed as part of the business contextual architecture).

The Attributes profiling technique enables any unique set of business requirements to be engineered as a standardised and re-usable set of specifications.

The attributes are modelled into a normalised language that articulates requirements, and measures performance in a way that is instinctive to all stakeholders.

Question 4

What are the SABSA Business Attribute profiling rules and Features?

Answer 4

1. Attributes can be tangible or intangible.
2. Each Attribute requires a meaningful name.
3. Each attribute requires a measurement approach and metric. (defined in the SABSA strategy and planning phase)
4. Performance targets are used as the basis for reporting and SLAs.
5. Powerful requirements engineering technique.
6. Populates the virtual missing link between business requirements and technology / process design.

Question 5

What makes up the SABSA Business Attributes Taxonomy ?

Answer 5

• Name
• Definition
• Classification

Question 6

What makes up the SABSA Business Attributes Profile?

Answer 6

The Attributes taxonomy (Name, Definition, Classification) + Measurement approach, Metric and Performance target.

Question 7

What are the applications of Attribute profiling ?

Answer 7

• Pick-list of desired requirements
• Cross-check for completeness of requirements.
• Key to traceability mappings.
• Measurement & Operations - contracts, SLAs, Performance Targets.
• Return on Investment & Value propositions.
• Procurement
• Risk status summary and Risk Monitoring
• Key to a SABSA integrated compliance tool.
• powerful executive communications.

Question 8

What is the purpose of Attribute Taxonomy ?

Answer 8

Attribute Taxonomy is just a picture, but an important one.
* It demonstrates that you understand the requirements and to gain buy-in and support for developing the solution in the SABSA Design phase.