Understanding your Assignment brief

Assignment summary:

Common industry practice is to have one security engineer working on all the security aspects and requirements of a system. On the contrary, there could be parallelisation of the security process by including as many experts as possible to inspect and develop the security of a system.

In the case of parallelising the security process of a system, brainstorming is the key to implementing effective security that will make a system more reliable and less prone to functioning and security errors. For example, people with expertise in different areas of security like cryptography, access control mechanisms and security audits could have been hired to secure the system under development.

Thus, it seems that it’s more cost-efficient to test in parallel than sequentially, as each security expert can focus on their own security space and, by testing it, could find the potential drawbacks faster than the non-experts.

Therefore, good management and wise selection of the experts that will be involved in this parallel process is a very serious and important task, which could result in the enhancement of the system security if it is successful. Note that the parallelisation approach could also be used in other processes of system development and testing.

Assignment Requirements

Submit a short answer to the following question. Is it better to rely on a single security engineer who will work on all the security aspects and requirements of the system, or is it better to have many different experts to work separately on these aspects? You will then be asked to peer review a fellow student’s submission, providing feedback based on the assignment guidelines listed further below.

This assignment contains 1 part. In the submission step you will be asked to submit 1 item. For each criterion you will receive either 1 point or 0 point, depending on whether your marker feels you have evidenced the criterion or not.

Task Prompt 1: Is it better to rely on a single security engineer who will work on all the security aspects and requirements of the system, or is it better to have many different experts to work separately on these aspects?

This first Prompt is graded against the following criteria:

Criteria 1: Has the learner identified an advantage of relying on a single security engineer?

Criteria 2: Has the learner identified a disadvantage of relying on a single security engineer?

Criteria 3: Has the learner identified an advantage of relying on a team of experts?

Criteria 4: Has the learner identified a disadvantage of relying on a team of experts?

Criteria 5: Has the learner summarised whether they consider it better to rely on a single security engineer or a team of engineers?

The next step is where you’ll submit your responses to these Task Prompts. You need to submit them all at the same time, so don’t start until you’re ready. You may choose to actually draft your work there, but you may wish to work offline or in a separate tab or document to perfect your ideas before you submit and share with your course peers.

Please note – you’ll be Prompted to give your assignment an overall descriptive title. It’s your chance to get creative, or you could keep this simple and descriptive.