After several months without being able to post any new material to this site i am now in a position to return to produce new articles and resources. I am going to pick up on a topic i made last year on the use of Cisco SAFE as the means to define a security reference architecture. I want to cover, in this post, some of the preparatory activities associated with the development of a reference architecture and its various components. For something as significant as a resource that will be used to guide the design, development and operations of a Smart City, it is key to ensure that the practice of reference architecture is accepted and promoted. this is especially important as a reference architecture must adapt and evolve with the growth of the City.
The stakeholders of the reference architecture have the following requirements and responsibilities to ensure a reference architecture fulfils its role and returns value.
1] Effective Governance through policy and process to enable the reference architecture to provide the necessary decision support to its users
2] Defined principles and their associated attributes to provide design instruction and guidance through documentation and models
3] Business value that is evident as early as possible in either the design or deployment of single or multiple solutions and services.
4] Agility and flexibility to adapt to the challenges and constraints that are part of city transformation projects and programmes.
5] Solution guidance with the authority to empower the designers and developers with blueprints and controls to deliver effective output
Finally, it is important to produce a reference architecture in a way that enables the requirements above. The solution for a reference architecture has to enable designers and architects to build the initial draft and then continuously manage, through consultation and validation, future iterations. A cloud-based design and authoring platform with document management, version control and collaborative tools should provide the required agility and flexibility to cover a wide range of user types and user scenarios.
I plan to build up the different parts of a reference architecture, with a focus on security, in future posts as it builds over the contextual, conceptual, logical and physical views.
Smart City Cyber Security 