Making the Case for Cybersecurity
the test coverage identified, controls reassessed, and affected stakeholders alerted— all automatically.
Our framework builds on model-based systems engineering( MBSE), DevSecOps culture, system assurance, and digital thread concepts. We identify where digital threads are currently broken and present a roadmap— aligned with the OMG Systems Assurance Task Force— to mend them through interoperable, knowledge-based standards.
What emerges is more than a smarter DevSecOps pipeline, but a new cybersecurity ecosystem: automated, proactive, explainable, and mission-aligned.
1 CYBERSECURITY AS A CONTINUOUS, KNOWLEDGE-BASED PROCESS
1.1 CYBERSECURITY IN THE SYSTEM LIFECYCLE
While vulnerability scanning, patching, and monitoring are now common operational practices, risk assessment— when done manually— remains a costly, static process, often disconnected from the fast-paced workflows of modern system development and deployment.
The Risk-Centric DevSecOps framework repositions risk assessment as a continuous activity, tightly integrated across the system lifecycle. Security is no longer an isolated function— it becomes a core engineering concern that evolves from requirements definition through architecture, implementation, integration, authorization, and sustained operation.
Making this shift requires seamless collaboration between diverse roles: engineers, system integrators, cybersecurity specialists, intelligence-base threat analysts, DevSecOps developers, cyber vulnerability assessors, test and evaluation personnel, operational staff, and governance authorities. When these handoffs break down, opportunities for attacks are not just overlooked – they’ re built in.
Importantly, the adversary is not a static entity. Attackers adapt quickly, and any viable framework must account for the temporal asymmetry between system builders, defenders, and threat actors. Proactively getting ahead of the attackers is the essence of digital, risk-centric cybersecurity.
In a risk-centric DevSecOps environment, cybersecurity is no longer just about enforcing coding practices and applying security patches. Instead, it becomes a process of delivering well-reasoned security mitigations in the right context, for the right threat environment— automatically, continuously, and at scale.
1.2 KNOWLEDGE AS THE BACKBONE OF CYBERSECURITY
The continuous collaboration in risk-centric DevSecOps is not just between teams— it is between tools. Automation replaces manual handoffs with machine-driven exchanges, where each stage in the pipeline produces and consumes structured, interpretable messages. These messages
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