Security Architect Interview Questions and Answers That Get You Hired

Are you looking for? Security architect interview questions? If so, this video is for you. Hi, this is Mike Gibbs, and I am here to help you with your next security architect interview. And in this video, I'll be presenting five security Architect interview questions and how I would answer them if I was looking to be hired as a security architect. So the first security architect interview question I will ask, is how do you ensure security is an enabler rather than a blocker to a business, which is a real issue. And many hiring managers ask this question. I would answer it something like this. I would say for me, security starts with the business objectives. And what I do is I align any security initiative or any architecture and initiative for that matter, with regards to whatever the business is looking for, whether that be revenue growth, customer trust, operational resilience. And in order to make sure that security is an enabler of that business. What I do is I design guard rails as opposed to gates for example, I may come up with some type of a standardized or an automated security pattern that enables teams to move quickly within safe boundaries. I make sure that we embed security early, so we embed security into the architectural design, DevSecOps pipeline, product planning from the very beginning, not after deployment. I tend to make sure we focus on as many frictionless security experiences as possible. So for example, single sign on and adaptive multifactor authentication as opposed to constant re authentication, we want to make it easy for the users to actually use so they don't find workarounds. And I always make sure we translate security into business language instead of we need x or we need this firewall or need we need whenever. I would typically say to the executive team, this control will reduce the likelihood of a breach by, say, 40% and therefore protect $50 million in revenue exposure or something to always tie it back to the business, because we're architects. The next security Architect interview question will be how do you balance risk, cost and user experience in your security design? Here's how I recommend answer it. But I would say something like, I use a risk based decision model, and that every control must map to some type of a specific and quantified business risk. And then I will evaluate, everything in the context of these three things. What is the risk reduction we're actually gaining? What is the cost to build operate in the complexity of an architecture. And what does the user or the developer experience going to be like? And when we know that, I first start by prioritizing, high risk and low, low friction controls, the first. And in many cases, we can add some form of a multifactor authentication, some better logging into Siem and source systems. Any kind of better identity controls. And these are typically big impact and very low cost. Now I tend to avoid controls that don't make sense because there are many controls that will add a lot of friction, but they provide minimal risk reduction. So if that's the case, I'm one of those types of controls. Unless we need it, we try not to use it. I tend to design tiered security models and that not all systems need the same level of control. For example, protecting the crown jewels is different than some, administrative app. That's not very important. That has, minimal data inside it. So what I'm trying to do here is I'm going to try to leverage automation whenever possible to reduce cost, to reduce friction. And that means that, the engineers that will implementing these things will be using policy as code automated compliance, CI, CD, security checks, for example. The next security architect interview question, that I'm going to ask is how do you prioritize security investments when budgets are constrained? Now, almost every manager asked the security architect interview question because budgets are always constrained. So here's how I would answer that question. Whenever it comes to prioritizing security investments, I always start with a business impact analysis, and with that, I need to know what systems generate revenue. What systems create actual risk for the organization along the way. And then what I do is I map investment to, risk reduction per dollar spent. So we want to look for the biggest risk reduction at the lowest cost. I typically map the investments to regulatory requirements because regulations may specify certain things.

And we have to meet those objectives. And I always map investments to business critical services. Now in order to do this first I focus on foundational controls, identity, multifactor authentication for example, to logging and visibility. We need to know what's going on. So I make sure we've got a very good logging set up into Siem. And so our systems network segmentation this is one of your cheapest ways to greatly enhance your security. And whether that's segmenting into VLANs or access control lists or multiple VPCs that don't communicate with each other. Any kind of network segmentation or firewalls we can do. We definitely want to use an a very strong backup and recovery approach. I try to eliminate, or redundant tools, which you find in many architectures are low value tools because tool sprawl is one of those big budget killers where people have too many tools, they're not using much of anything out of the tools, and it has a lot of complexity, and it tends to kill budgets. And then I try to build it into a phased roadmap. So let's go first with our quick wins, then let's go for some mid-term improvements. And then obviously we've got our long term investments long term transformation. And in order to make it think and to stick with the executive audience that's going to fund us, I make sure that I always communicate the ROI of the security architecture in terms of risk reduction. There's $1 million investment in reduces breach probability by, say, whatever percent. And it protects this amount of revenue. So it's always being seen as an investment with an ROI, typically in terms of risk reduction. This question is extremely common for security architects on interviews and even other architects as well. How do you define and measure the security architecture success? Here's how I would answer that. Security success is not just the absence of breaches, even though that's a key goal. The measure of success is really about our resilience, our risk reduction and our business alignment. So I'm going to measure the effectiveness of the security architecture across several domains. The first domain is risk reduction. And that means the reduction in attack surface, a decrease in, say, critical vulnerabilities. And improve security postures. What is our residual risk after we mitigated some of the risk that we had? The second thing that I'm going to be looking for is detection and response saying mean time to detect, mean time to repair, to respond to something because we want to see how good we've gotten, how good our playbooks and architectures got us to contain incidents if and when they occur. The next thing to judge an architecture is effectiveness is business alignment. The security initiatives need to be tied into some business outcomes. So is there minimal friction for the users? And are they using the security of the system, and is the security enabling them to do things faster or is it slowing them down? We have to check that. And I always check compliance and governance. So what is our audit success rate? Are we adhering to the policy and if so, and what percentage of the time what kind of reductions in our expenses. So that's really giving us a lot. I tend to look at leading indicators as well, not just the lagging indicators that we talked about before. Some leading indicators could be percentage of workloads, for example, enabled with least privilege, percentage of systems that are covered by a centralized logging percentage of identities with multi-factor authentication. So the key is security is measurable. We just have to measure the right things. Okay. Now another security architect interview question for you. How do you evaluate emerging security technologies for adoption? Oh, that's one that happens a lot. And what they're gauging for is that you're not chasing shiny object syndrome. You need it because it's new, cool and exciting. So here's the way I would answer that question. I would say I do not start with the technology. I actually start with the actual business problem for us. What risks are we solving? What gaps exist in our current architecture? So accordingly, I'm going to evaluate emerging technology, emerging technologies across several criterias other than them being called. The first criteria is business alignment. Does this emerging technology support our strategic goals? Does it reduce any meaningful risk it needs to be included? Second is architectural fit. Does this emerging technology integrate with our existing ecosystem? Does it support our hybrid multi-cloud needs, which are most enterprises need? For example? Third would be operational impact. What is the complexity to deploy and manage this emerging security technology, and what is the skill needed to operate this technology?

I typically look at the cost versus the value of what's this thing gonna cost? Not just the licensing, but the total cost of ownership. And what is the measurable risk reduction I'm going to get out of it. And I typically also look at the vendor maturity. You know, what is that vendor's market presence. Are they stable. Do they have a good support an ecosystem. Because that's what we're really looking for now that gets us half the way there. I typically like to validate with, say, a proof of value, not just a proof of concept. So we want to look and see is it going to improve outcomes in our environment. And that's really what I do. In order to make sure that we evaluate emerging technologies to see if they're going to fit in our environment. If you'd like to become an enterprise architect, a security architect and artificial intelligence architect or multi-cloud architect, we run two completely free architecture webinars per week. You can register for these architecture webinars, by clicking on the link in the description of this video and on these free architecture webinars which are on zoom, we'll talk about what we do as security architects, the skills you need as a security architect or any other architect career for that matter. Based upon the webinar, we'll talk about what hiring managers are looking for, where we'll talk about how to actually get interviews without necessarily recklessly applying to 1,000,000 in 1 places. And then I'll answer any kind of architecture career question you have about enterprise architect, career security architect, careers, AI architect, careers, cloud architect careers, network architecture, or any architecture career for that matter. Like I said, register for one of these free architecture webinars. The description is in this video, and, these sessions are live and free and you can ask any questions and we'll answer them by and free. If you'd like to become an architect, we have complete architecture training programs for any architecture career, like an enterprise architect or a security architect. You can learn more about them on the Go Cloud Careers website. And, if you enjoyed this video, please give it a like. Subscribe to our channel and hit the bell to be notified of new videos to assist you in your architecture career. This is Mike Gibbs signing off for now and I hope to see you so.