Operational Threat Modeling

What Is Operational Threat Modeling?

A distinct practice within the broader field of threat modeling, operational threat modeling provides a holistic view of an organization’s infrastructure, people, and processes, allowing teams to visualize and manage threats across an entire operational environment. This enables security teams to develop mitigation strategies to manage infrastructure risk and align with business objectives. Operational threat modeling maps threats to operational components such as servers and databases. It uses data flow diagrams (DFDs) and threat modeling methodologies to identify threats from an attacker’s point of view. 

Why Is It Important?

Threat modeling exercises can sometimes focus on software applications and technical attacks, leading to overlooking operational dependencies between apps and other systems. When operational threat modeling is paired with application threat modeling, businesses obtain a “big picture” view of technical vulnerabilities, attack surfaces, and the organization as a whole. This enables security teams to examine both system-level relationships and single points of failure to identify which vulnerabilities and risks could have a cascading impact across an organization.

What Are Some Key Considerations?

As a subset of threat modeling, operational threat modeling bolsters risk management and incident response while contributing to a more security-minded culture. Its comprehensive purview is especially valuable for building business resilience and continuity planning and facilitating closer collaboration between security teams and other stakeholder groups. However, operational threat modeling must be complemented by application threat modeling and security monitoring in DevOps to provide a complete view of an organization’s infrastructure, application estate, and business risks. Additionally, operational threat modeling can be resource-intensive if not approached properly and requires ongoing maintenance to continue providing value.

How Is It Related to Threat Modeling?

As a comprehensive threat modeling strategy component, operational threat modeling plays an important role in assessing a business’s entire security posture. When combined with application threat modeling, operational threat modeling helps create a truly holistic risk management practice to better identify, prioritize, and address both technical and organizational risks.

Closing

Operational threat modeling is essential for gaining a comprehensive view of an organization’s security posture and threat landscape. When combined with application-centric methodologies, it offers an enterprise-wide perspective that addresses both technical and non-technical risks, ensuring a more robust and well-rounded security strategy.