. In accordance with us being Cyber Work, I want to talk a little bit about your work
life here. What do you do as a security architect for Motorola? Can you sort of walk me through
your average day of tasks and assignments? For people who are like, “I’ve never heard
of what a security architect is,” what exactly do you do as a security architect?
[29:23] PB: Right. As part of security architect, I play several roles within the same day for
my organization. If I have to give you a high level hierarchy, I would say my roles range
from tactical and strategic. As tactical, for example, an example of a security setup
that I'm working on right now is we’re bringing up a new instance of a next-generation firewall
in the cloud environment. This would reside on a virtual machine skill set let’s say.
Then we are now in the process of updating so we are also in a process of onboarding
new applications on this firewall. We have to set up all the routing and logging and
routing procedures within the cloud environment. You can see how the network knowledge comes
into the picture of the cloud. The latest cloud technology comes into the picture. You
can know the firewall as well.
Then once you've been through – You got the logs coming into the next-gen firewall,
you also have to route the logs to go in your SIM instance where they will be ingested and
processed and indexed. So then we also have, for example, the elastic sort of stack coming
into the picture where you’re ingesting the logs produced by the firewall ultimately.
In the firewall, if you want advanced features, you're doing SSL decryption. So a lot of technologies
come into play, and so my tactical work would include sitting down and not just designing
this architecture. Putting it down on paper. Okay, well, this is what the flow is going
to look like. This is where we’ll collect logs. This is where the log is going to go.
But also, we believe in walking. We call it walk the walk as well. You can’t just design
the blueprint and then give it to somebody else to implement. You have to dense it down
and try to implement it. When you try to implement it, you come across these little issues that
you never thought about when you were designing at a higher level. So then you don’t just
leave it to the DevOps engineers. You actually realize the struggle they go through when
they’re implementing something that you designed at a higher level. That’s –
[31:49] CS: You’re seeing the flaws before they do.
[31:52] PB: That’s right, yeah. We work side-by-side with DevOps engineers at this
point. We have designed the blueprint but we also will take the tools and then we’ll
start hammering away on this build. That kind of work can get really tactical. On the other
hand, I also play a strategic role where – This is more of the design component, so this is
more architecture. Within the constraints of our environments and the technology that
is available today, what is the best series of solutions to a problem we’re facing?
When you implement this and when you’re thinking about this, what is the long-term
impacts of the solution you are proposing because you can’t just think about what’s
going to happen today, but you also have to think strategically about what's going to
happen in a year or two years from now, right?
For example, you’re trying to direct the huge volume of firewall logs. Then on an event
hubs instance, that will buckle under pressure at some point, right? Not right now maybe
but somewhere down the line is you’re onboarding more application. So you have to think about
the long-term impacts of your solution as well. It's important not to get pigeonholed
when considering the solution to a problem, and so think not just of your team and the
problem at hand, but how would the solution affect other teams and the organization as
a whole. That's more for a strategic role.
Some of the other examples would be like I also get involved in purchase decisions, considering
the purchase of future technologies. There’s business teams that will get involved in these
discussions as well. But while they might be considering pricing and other things, you
still have to keep focus on the technology. Is there really quality technology there?
Then you have to identify those elements as well so that everything goes smoothly somewhere
down the line. Those are some of the tasks that I do as part of security architecture.
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