The Security Systems Development Life Cycle

Ensuring information security is properly managed businesses have implanted an approach to help manage it. The implementation is called the security systems development life cycle. The security systems development life cycle consists of six phases and each phase is crucial to the other. Starting with the initial phase, the six phases are investigation, analysis, logical design, physical design, implementation, then finally, maintenance and change. Each security phase is integral to the systems development life cycle due to its life cycle process.

The investigation phase is the beginning to the systems development life cycle and is considered the most important (Whitman, 2015, p. 27). As Whitman (2015) points out, as the first step, it is used in order to determine what the problem needing to be solved is and begins with an enterprise information security policy. This policy lay out the framework of a security program within the organization (Whitman, 2015, p. 27). Not only in this step are the problems discovered but objectives, constraints and scope of the project are specified (Whitman, 2015, p. 25). These help to concluded whether or not the company should go through with the implementation (Whitman, 2015, p. 25). As the first process, investigation doesn’t necessarily have a predecessor unless the current system cannot support the evolving mission of the organization (Whitman, 2015, p. 26). At that point, maintenance and change is considered the predecessor and the analysis process is the successor.

Analysis follows as a phase used to study findings from the investigation phase, in accordance to Whitman(2015). The findings from the predecessor phase investigation are user by the development team to conduct an analysis of...

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...fe cycle, there would not be an incident response action in place leaving a huge vulnerability in case of a catastrophe. Physical design is the phase where physical security measures are created to make sure the technologies are well protected, with this measure, data breaches and other malicious attacks could harm the business. With implementation of software, this phase gives businesses an opportunity to create or purchase security solutions instead of presenting a flawed system to users without the protection it requires. Lastly, without the security of consistent testing and monitoring in the maintenance and change phase, systems will become obsolete and detrimental to a business itself due to outdated systems (Whitman, 2015, p. 29). As fundamental as it sounds, without security in a software development life cycle, you open a business up to many potential flaws.