An architect and two engineers agree the new service will sit behind a private gateway. Six months later someone adds a public endpoint, because nobody told them, because there was nowhere to tell them.
You are the one person expected to hold all of it in your head.
The project
A design review, ideally before the build starts.
Every new system
The engineers
What to actually implement, in terms they can action.
At design time
The auditor
Evidence the design decision was made and approved.
Months later
The next architect
Why the system looks the way it does.
After you have moved on
The work
01
Describe what you are building in a paragraph and the canvas draws it in your house style. Diagrams are named and versioned and an architect approves each version, so the picture and the decision cannot drift apart while nobody is looking.
02
Pull the boxes off the diagram and they become the things you can attack: services, data stores, the connections between them. Write down what could go wrong with each. You are not retyping your own design into a second tool.
03
Pick the control that deals with each threat and it lands on the project with an owner, a due date and somewhere to attach the proof. Try to tick a threat off without naming a control and the system says no, so the standard does not depend on who is in the room.
04
When someone signs off with conditions attached, the risk is raised automatically and linked back to the project. The caveat added at five to five on a Friday is still there on Monday, with a name against it.
05
Reference designs publish as versions that cannot be changed after the fact, with a catalogue and a branded PDF. The next project starts from what you already worked out rather than from an empty page.
Afterwards
Six months later, these are still answerable.
“That gateway is private because of this threat, mapped to this control.”
“The endpoint changed in March. Here is who classified it major, and why.”
“Four people signed this off, and each of them wrote down what they thought.”
“The condition on that approval became a risk automatically. It is still open.”
“Here is the whole project as one branded PDF, diagrams and sign-offs included.”