Beautiful Security

How a Disciplined System Development Lifecycle Can Help

When I returned to NASA in January of 2003, I had the pleasure of working on a project to redesign the NASA nonmission (i.e., general purpose) wide area network. The project had strong support from two critical senior leaders who understood the value of applying a strong system development lifecycle approach, to ensure that the new design was secure, robust, and scalable. I co-led the project with Betsy Edwards, the owner of the current network. We assembled a cross-functional team that included Jim McCabe, an excellent network architect; John McDougle, a strong Project Manager; and a team of security specialists, end users, network architects, network operations engineers, and network test engineers.

John McDougle kept the team on a disciplined design process (shown in Figure 10-5), where we developed options and evaluated them against the full suite of metrics. The final design was a major departure from the existing network architecture, but all of the design decisions were clearly documented and founded on the prioritized system requirements. The final system was deployed on budget and on schedule; it provided 10 times the bandwidth of the network it replaced at a lower monthly operational cost. John did an excellent job keeping all of the disciplines supporting the project—including security and the operations and management staff—engaged throughout the lifecycle.

Figure 10-5. The NASA program management process

Jim McCabe ...