Method Framework for Developing Enterprise Architecture Security Principles

Abstract

Organizations need to consider many facets of information security in their daily operations – among others, the rapidly increasing use of IT, emerging technologies and digitalization of organizations’ core resources provoke new threats that can be difficult to anticipate. It has been argued that the security and privacy considerations should be embedded in all the areas of organizational activities instead of only relying technical security mechanisms provided by the underlying systems and software. Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) offers a holistic approach for managing different dimensions of an organization, and can be conceived as a coherent and consistent set of principles that guide how the enterprise must be designed. This article contributes with a method framework for integrating information security with EAM, aimed at providing support for the decision-making related to formulating context-aware EA security principles. The presented method framework is a result of a constructive research based on both the theoretical body of knowledge and the empirical evidence, obtained by interviewing 35 Finnish EA and information security practitioners.