Security Engineering

Many organisations acquire security controls incrementally over time. Firewalls are added, monitoring is deployed, policies are written, and software is installed. Yet systems that have accumulated security features are not necessarily secure systems. Security Engineering focuses on the overall architecture of the environment and how its components interact. Our goal is to build security into the design of systems rather than layering controls on afterwards. A combination of multiple weak security measures often remains weak; a system built on fundamentally secure foundations, in contrast, may provide security that scales even with expanding organisational requirements.

Many cybersecurity organisations place emphasis on monitoring and detection capabilities. Detecting attacks as they happen is highly valuable for security. However, just as knowledge of security weaknesses is insufficient without the operational ability to address those weaknesses, the ability to detect attacks is insufficient if all one can do is sit back and watch. Visibility into what is happening on your systems is vital, but only as the first step. We aim to set up systems that can operationalise visibility - that is, that can respond to minimise the damage that attacks inflict.

In addition to active response to attacks, a critical aspect of our approach to security engineering is to design systems so as to passively minimise the damage even successful attacks can inflict. At the network layer, we can design and implement segmentation, egress filtering, and the architecture of least trust that contains a breach to a fraction of the estate rather than the whole. At the identity layer - increasingly the real perimeter - we can implement tiered administration, privileged access management, and conditional access, so that a single compromised account does not become control of everything.

More specific engineering strategies can of course be tailored to the needs of your organisation. We emphasise combining automated security solutions with human processes as complementary. No security operations centre that relies purely on humans to identify and address incidents can respond faster than an automated system can execute an attack. Likewise, no automated response system can coordinate the activity of an entire organisation to minimise damage. Assessing what mix of software and human processes is appropriate to your security needs is a foundational element of our Security Engineering offering.

Imagine you are in a crowd when a hungry tiger is released. You may be unable to outrun the tiger itself - but to escape it, you only need to outrun the people around you. Opportunistic attackers - the threats SMEs typically face in practice - generally operate similarly. Many cybersecurity companies emphasise standardised security benchmarks such as the CIS Benchmarks List, and compliance-driven security approaches such as Cyber Essentials, Cyber Essentials Plus, and ISO 27001. Security frameworks provide a useful starting point, but they are necessarily designed around broadly applicable controls. They don't let you run faster than everyone else in the crowd. To make yourself a less attractive target to attackers than your competitors are, you need to take a step further.

Our deliverable is your organisation itself - now implementing working, documented defensive processes and infrastructure, and equipped with the knowledge to maintain those processes and systems yourself. What we sell is operational capability, not security controls. This work draws on our wider Systems Engineering practice and pairs naturally with our offensive testing, which provides the independent verification that what we built does what it is meant to.