What Does An Information Security Architect Do?

WHAT DOES AN INFORMATION SECURITY ARCHITECT DO?

Published: Aug 22, 2025 - The Information Security Architect collaborates with CIO teams and business lines to define and implement security requirements across products, services, applications, and systems. This role ensures governance and evaluation of security controls while supporting the design, enhancement, and integration of security measures within technology environments. The architect also delivers clear communication of security strategies to management, business stakeholders, and technical teams appropriately and effectively.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Information Security Architect

1. Information Security Architect Duties

Threat Analysis: Identifying significant threat changes and exposures to threats of assets associated with information security and assisting in remediation efforts
Stakeholder Communication: Interact with senior stakeholders across departments and be the point of contact for information security for other architectural resources within the group
Security Architecture: Research and apply innovative security architecture solutions to new or existing problems and be able to justify and communicate design decisions
Decision Making: Understand the impact of decisions, balancing requirements and deciding between approaches
Vision Development: Develop vision, principles and strategy for security architecture on project or technology decisions
Standards Alignment: Align standards, frameworks and security with the overall business and technology strategy
System Implementation: Design, build and implement enterprise-class security systems for a production environment
Technical Design: Lead the technical design of secure systems, services and produce particular patterns that support quality assurance
Threat Mitigation: Design security architecture elements to mitigate threats as they emerge
Solution Design: Create solutions that balance business requirements with information and cybersecurity requirements
Design Review: Identify security design gaps in existing and proposed architectures and recommend changes or enhancements

2. Information Security Architect Details

Architectural Vision: Provides architectural vision to align Information Security to strategic business needs and goals
Security Planning: Develops security design plans based on sound enterprise architecture practices
Board Participation: Contribute to and participate in the Architecture Review Board and the Architect community activities to ensure the design and implementation of sound solutions
Configuration Standards: Develops baseline security configuration standards for operating systems (e.g., operating system hardening), network segmentation, and identity and access management (IAM)
Policy Development: Contributes to the development of security procedures and standards to be reviewed and approved by the Chief Information Security Officer (CSIO)
Strategic Alignment: Contribute to the strategic roadmap and technical direction of the business and IT
Architecture Artifacts: Develops and maintains security architecture artifacts (models, templates, standards and procedures) that can be used to leverage security capabilities in projects and operations
Data Protection: Develops standards and practices for data encryption and tokenization within the organization based on the organization’s data classification criteria
Threat Monitoring: Tracks developments and changes in the digital business and threat environments to ensure that these are adequately addressed in security strategy plans and architecture artifacts
Infrastructure Validation: Validates IT infrastructure and other reference architectures for security best practices, and recommends changes to enhance security and reduce risk

3. Information Security Architect Responsibilities

Configuration Validation: Validates security configurations and access to security infrastructure tools, including firewalls, intrusion prevention systems (IPSs), web application firewalls (WAFs), anti-malware/endpoint protection systems, etc.
Threat Modeling: Conducts or facilitates threat modeling of services and applications that are tied to the risk and data associated with the service or application
Asset Inventory: Accurate and valid inventory of all systems, infrastructure and applications is conducted, which should be logged by the security information and event management (SIEM) or log management tool
Data Protection: Coordinates with the compliance and privacy officers to understand sensitive data within the organization (e.g., PII or ePHI) and recommends controls to ensure this data is adequately secured
Network Segmentation: Reviews network segmentation to ensure least privilege for network access
Architecture Collaboration: Liaisons with other architects and security practitioners to share best practices and insights
Project Advisory: Participates in application and infrastructure projects to provide security planning advice
Continuity Planning: Liaisons with the business continuity management team to validate security practices for both disaster recovery planning (DRP) and business continuity management (BCM) testing and operations when a failover occurs
Technology Evaluation: Reviews security technologies, tools and services, and makes recommendations to the broader security team for their use based on security, financial and operational metrics

4. Information Security Architect Job Summary

Strategic Delivery: Work to achieve strategic and operational targets with a significant impact on the IT Security Architecture results
Project Leadership: Responsible for entire projects/ programs or processes as an industry-knowledgeable lead within IT Security Architecture
Thought Leadership: Provide thought leadership, mentorship and advisory services to IT, business and project teams to ensure that security controls are in line with the security architecture direction and business strategies
Security Reviews: Perform highly complex security reviews with no precedent, identify gaps in IT Security Architecture and develop a security risk management plan
Employee Training: Provide significant security guidance, coaching and training to other employees across the company across a broad area of expertise
Solution Alignment: Provide leadership, mentorship and advisory services to IT, business, and project teams to ensure that solutions are in line with the architecture direction and business strategies
Framework Creation: Create and utilize a standard security framework (NIST, HIPAA), consistent automated questionnaires to simplify security intake and engagements
Program Assessment: Perform project and program assessments and provide constructive feedback through the SAR (Security Architecture Review) process and solutioning
Architecture Contribution: Contribute to the creation and maintenance of Target State Security Architectures, Security Roadmap, and Security Architecture Principles that ensure the qualities of security are maintained in derived solutions for assigned Security Domains
Framework Design: Contribute to security system design and architecture frameworks including technology architecture strategy, policies, ‘guiding principles’ and governing standards for security in the assigned domain
Risk Minimization: Apply industry/technical knowledge to provide solutions that increase business results and minimize risk
Cloud Representation: Representing the Security Platform in the development and implementation of the overall global enterprise cloud architecture
Cloud Architecture: Design and develop security architectures for the target public cloud

5. Information Security Architect Accountabilities

Architect Collaboration: Collaborate with IT infrastructure architects and software development architects, focusing on end-to-end engineering
Standard Development: Guide the development of architectural standards, processes and tools that drive not only security, but predictability, consistency, performance, quality and satisfaction by company and industry standards and best practices
Architecture Definition: Define and deliver security architecture, reference architecture, prescriptive architecture and design patterns for the IT organization for both on-premise and cloud deployment in mind
Team Direction: Direct the enterprise architecture team with considerations for security/application vulnerability, various application development approaches and architectural frameworks
Consultative Support: Work in a consultative fashion with other IT leaders, which may improve their efficiency and effectiveness
Architecture Delivery: Responsible for the development of architectures that deliver and support information security
Strategic Alignment: Collaborate on architectures that support the overall strategy, portfolios, projects, and solution delivery
Hands-on Contribution: Work hands-on as a growing team and additional resources may not always be available
Leadership Support: Support IT leadership functions including annual planning, budgeting, status reporting, presentations and continuous improvement
Industry Awareness: Keep current with trends and issues in the IT industry, including current technologies and delivery models
Mission Promotion: Actively promotes the mission of the company within the organization

6. Information Security Architect Functions

Project Leadership: Leads team through complex integration projects
Technical Ownership: Maintains technical ownership of one or more business-facing technologies to deliver business outcomes
Integration Support: Leads, supports, and interacts with various IT teams and LOBs on integration efforts
Strategic Planning: Defines strategic requirements, roadmap, or direction for data integration capabilities
Architecture Design: Assists in the design of data integration architecture and solutions
Team Coordination: Plans and supports a team of on-shore and off-shore Informatica developers to deliver exceptional quality and meet all project deadlines
Data Management: Leads technical aspects of data management functions including creating, loading, transforming, cleansing, processing, analyzing, and visualizing data
Effort Estimation: Collaborates with management to develop estimates for project and maintenance work
Stakeholder Alignment: Leads collaboration with business and technology stakeholders to define future-state business capabilities and requirements
Architecture Translation: Assists with translating those into transitional and target state data architectures
ETL Development: Develops ETL logic utilizing Informatica workflows, scripting, and load utilities

7. Senior Information Security Architect Job Description

Leadership Partnership: Participates in/develops leadership partnerships for IT and Operations projects to support information security architecture and integration of all security elements
Threat Research: Researches the threat landscape and conducts vulnerability analysis on merging risks to the organization
Remediation Recommendation: Recommends remediation activities to management
Project Participation: Participate in general IT and Business projects to support information security architecture and integration of security elements into solutions
Risk Counseling: Counsel teams on the management of residual risk based on product purchase or system design
Process Management: Directs the creation and upkeep of information security processes and documentation
Policy Drafting: Draft and maintain Information Technology policies, standards and procedures across the IT infrastructure landscape
Security Governance: Draft and maintain policy and procedure specific to Information Security and Assurance
Continuity Planning: Participates in disaster recovery and business continuity planning
Process Mapping: Leads the production of as-is and to-be process flows, depicting process efficiencies and improvements
Training Development: Recommends, drafts, and updates information security awareness training across multiple delivery methods, including but not limited to CBT, e-mail, SharePoint sites, and live training
Incident Response: Participate in the computer incident response team, focusing on lessons learned and post-event improvement
Project Leadership: Leads in projects, representing the Information Security team
Mentor Leadership: Provides mentor leadership to other Information Security staff
Risk Assessment: Lead the information security risk assessment process

8. Information Security Architect Overview

Process Oversight: Develops and refines the TxDOT Secure System Development Lifecycle (SDLC) processes and oversees other ISSOs performing SDLC functions
Plan Coordination: Coordinates the implementation of system security plans with agency personnel and outside vendors
User Engagement: Confers with users to discuss issues such as account permission and data access needs, security violations, and programming changes
Security Advisory: Advises management and users regarding security configurations and procedures
Safeguard Planning: Develops and recommends plans to safeguard information systems from accidental or unauthorized modification, destruction, or disclosure and to meet emergency data processing needs
Continuity Participation: Participates in the development of information technology disaster recovery and business continuity planning
Risk Assessment: Performs and reviews technical risk assessments and reviews of new and existing applications and systems, including data center physical security and environment
Breach Prevention: Researches, evaluates, and recommends systems and procedures for the prevention, detection, containment, and correction of data security breaches
Architecture Enablement: Develops and maintains a security architecture process that enables the enterprise to develop and implement security solutions and capabilities that are aligned with the business, technology, and threat drivers and mitigate threats as they emerge
Strategy Planning: Develops IT and OT technological security strategy plans and roadmaps based on sound enterprise architecture practices
Artifact Maintenance: Develops and maintains security architecture artifacts (e.g., models, templates, standards, and procedures) that can be used to leverage security capabilities in projects and operations
Design Review: Identify security design gaps in existing and proposed architectures and recommend changes or enhancements
Standard Definition: Determines and develops information security standards that must be applied by the operational and/or project teams (baseline security configuration standards, network segmentation, and identity and access management (IAM), data encryption and tokenization, application security, etc.)

9. Information Security Architect Details and Accountabilities

Framework Design: Assist in designing and developing an architecture framework to govern how solutions will be developed and implemented, including technology domain architecture strategy, policies, guiding principles and standards
Security Alignment: Work with the team and other technology partners to understand security standards and risks, as well as ratify solution security design
Requirement Analysis: Research and analyze business requirements to recommend optimal architecture solutions
Solution Review: Review and approve detailed solution architecture and design to comply with architectural and security standards, patterns and frameworks
Project Contribution: Contribute to project plan development, offer input, manage projects and initiatives, direct assigned resources, communicate project status and ensure timely issue escalation
Expert Participation: Participate as an expert and consultant on projects of moderate to high risk and complexity
Traceability Support: Help develop a Requirement Traceability Matrix for end-to-end traceability (solution to requirements)
Consensus Building: Build consensus, facilitate collaboration and decision-making within and across business units so the IT strategy application aligns with the architecture framework
Compliance Review: Ensure projects comply with technology domain architecture, design and operation processes to help review ongoing activity against technology architecture and development standards
Standards Compliance: Respect TD's technology delivery practices, standards and project management disciplines, including system requirements, project documentation creation, cost and scope estimation
Strategy Support: Support development, documentation, communication and execution of a comprehensive strategy, policies and solutions
Implementation Review: Conduct pre- and post-implementation reviews to ensure solutions have met requirements, identify framework gaps, necessary enhancements, potential standards and patterns for future versions
Standards Contribution: Contribute to the technology standards decision-making process
Investment Assessment: Establish parameters for continued solution investments, provide technical risk analysis and assessment

10. Information Security Architect Tasks

Program Maturation: Help shape a maturing security program with a focus on security reviews, application security, infrastructure security, and incident detection and response
Policy Development: Create and maintain security policies, standards, procedures, and systems that mitigate and prevent vulnerabilities in products and operations
Standards Implementation: Provide support for implementing security standards, performing self-assessments and coordinating related external audits
Security Automation: Develop and implement new ways to automate and improve security to reduce the time to investigate security incidents
Best Practices: Work with product, quality assurance, and engineering teams to ensure security best practices
Champion Support: Build a support system for the security champions across the company
Customer Alignment: Work closely with the product team to understand customers’ security needs and current priorities
Remediation Strategy: Collaborate with key stakeholders on remediation strategies, provide guidance, and follow through on closure
Policy Advisory: Work closely with the People Operations team to advise on policies, train, and enforce security policies and procedures, and help respond to cyber events involving employees
Compliance Auditing: Monitor, enforce, and routinely audit the compliance of all information security policies, procedures and contingency plans to ensure changes to relevant regulations are adhered to
Vulnerability Analysis: Perform analysis of scan results and determine criticality ratings for vulnerabilities that impact all production environments
Policy Communication: Confidently communicate the information security policies enforced with a range of audiences
Message Delivery: Ensuring the messages are concise, articulate, impactful, and use the most appropriate methods of communication
Report Generation: Provide quality reports to summarise test activities, including objectives, planning, methodology, results, analysis and recommendations to both technical and non-technical audiences

11. Information Security Architect Roles

Investigation Leadership: Incident response lead on investigations and applied in the context of a broader understanding of CSIRT and related systems and processes
Forensics Examination: Incident responder who conducts forensics examination of digital media, memory, malware, network logs, packet capture and other logs
Tool Development: Develop the tools necessary to perform cutting-edge analysis, especially around networks and cloud infrastructure
Solution Definition: Utilize IT skills and experience to define potential solutions to forensics, especially related to network visibility and cloud infrastructures
Red Teaming: Develop and lead RED TEAM practice, including engagements and penetration tests, of identifying and safely exploiting vulnerabilities
Staff Development: Encouraging improvement and innovation within Incident response and nurturing and developing less-experienced staff through coaching and written and verbal feedback
Report Preparation: Prepare and review reports that promote constant security enhancements
Standards Application: Apply and execute standard information systems theories, concepts and techniques and assist in the development of standards and procedures
Threat Hunting: Perform threat hunting to find advanced cyber adversaries by utilizing threat intelligence and attacker TTPs or IOCs
Threat Intelligence: Contribute to threat intelligence tracking, modeling, and systems
Technology Utilization: Transitioning, maintaining, or using Security Technologies such as Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM), Endpoint protection, EDR, NDR, Data Loss Prevention, and Forensic tools
Playbook Coordination: Work with Security Operations L1-L3 on detection and response playbooks

12. Information Security Architect Additional Details

Strategy Implementation: Planning, Design and hands-on Implementation of development and maintenance of security architecture strategy, process, hardening and configuration standards based on best practices
ICS Strategy: Working with both the Head of ICS and the Spectris Security team to create and implement an ICS strategy encompassing HBK group, Values and business strategic initiatives
Infrastructure Validation: Validating IT infrastructure and security configurations including firewalls, IPSs, WAFs and anti-malware/endpoint protection systems
Threat Modeling: Conducts or facilitates threat modeling of services and applications that tie to the risk and data associated with the service or application
Stakeholder Liaison: Liaising with key stakeholders, including DevOps teams, privacy offices, Vendor Management teams and the business as a whole
Work Evaluation: Evaluating Statements of Work from Managed Service Providers to ensure adequate security protections are in place
Knowledge Sharing: Liaising with other architects and security practitioners to share best practices, insights and guidance on how to complete tasks effectively
Audit Collaboration: Collaborating with the internal audit (IA) team and external assessors to review and evaluate the design and operational effectiveness of security-related controls
Requirement Analysis: Collect, interpret, evaluate, and validate business requirements, functions and processes associated with assigned projects
Team Collaboration: Work with the Project Team’s solution architects and technical team members
Architecture Development: Develop security solution architectures that comply with the organization’s InfoSec policies, standards, non-functional requirements, reference architectures and patterns under the guidance of senior staff Domain Security Architects
Risk Mitigation: Identify security risks and provide recommendations, solutions, and options to best mitigate those risks

13. Information Security Architect Essential Functions

Architecture Planning: Plans, researches, and designs security architecture for IT systems
Cloud Infrastructure: Uses knowledge of cloud infrastructure and systems to help engineering teams design and install internal and external cloud infrastructure, applications, and systems
Installation Approval: Develops, reviews, and approves installation requirements for LANs, WANs, VPNs, firewalls, routers, and related network devices
Network Support: Assist SecOps with network performance by monitoring performance, troubleshooting network problems and outages, scheduling upgrades, and collaborating with network architects on network optimization
Protocol Evaluation: Determines security protocols by evaluating business strategies and requirements and updates applicable policies and procedures
Incident Response: Responds to and investigates security incidents and provides thorough post-event analyses
Timeline Development: Develops project timelines for ongoing system upgrades
Security Enhancement: Reviews system security measures and implements necessary enhancements
Security Testing: Conducts regular tests and monitoring of network security
System Verification: Verifies security systems by developing and implementing test scripts

14. Information Security Architect Role Purpose

Product Partnership: Partner with the product teams on developing and maintaining the various security product offerings that the team supports or is looking to take on for support
Process Improvement: Help create, improve processes, tooling, documentation, and delivery on outcomes that enable the team to succeed and deliver a fanatical support experience to customers
Vendor Collaboration: Partner with vendors on product enhancements, driving feature requests for the product offering, testing and providing feedback about the product offering to the vendor, and developing training and documentation to enable Rackspace to support these product enhancements
Gap Identification: Identify gaps in current service offerings related to documentation, inefficiencies, automation opportunities, training, etc. and work with management to drive improvements in Rackspace's various service offerings
Skill Development: Responsible for developing and maintaining a general plan for Rackers to improve themselves from a technical standpoint
Training Creation: Responsible for developing and maintaining training materials and suggested technical certifications to help drive the team from a technical standpoint
Policy Development: Partner with leadership to develop policies and standards for the team to help drive a great support experience for customers and Rackspace
Process Optimization: Responsible for driving improvements in the fleet management process
Vulnerability Awareness: Keeping up to date on the latest security vulnerabilities, code upgrades, maintenance, and audit capabilities related to the security services provided by the team
Team Mentorship: Mentor and assist all team members with their job duties
Role Documentation: Create documentation to allow for all roles to execute their job duties

15. Information Security Architect General Responsibilities

Business Representation: Represent the Information Security team with the lines of Business by working with the Information Technology CIO teams to understand security needs for products, services, processes, applications and systems
Requirement Facilitation: Facilitate the identification and definition of security requirements for technology products, services, processes, applications and systems
Governance Participation: Participate in governance activities to evaluate the security controls and protections for new or modified technology business products, services, processes, applications and systems
Control Design: Engage with other Information Security teams to help design and enhance the security controls for Information Technology or Information Security products, services, processes, applications and systems
Security Integration: Engage with other Information Security teams to help facilitate the dissemination of Information Security products, services, processes, applications and systems into the technology environment
Project Consulting: Serve as a security engineer or consultant on projects
Stakeholder Communication: Communicate ideas both verbally and in writing to management, business and IT sponsors, and technical resources in language that is appropriate for each group
Security Research: Participate in conducting security research on business and Information Security products and services
Standard Consultation: Support the Bank's information security activities, including consultation for the development and maintenance of standards, procedures, and guidelines necessary to satisfy the Information Security department's responsibilities
Risk Assessment: Assist in conducting risk assessments to evaluate the effectiveness of existing controls and determine the impact of proposed changes to business products, services, processes, applications and systems
Audit Support: Provide technical support to regulatory agencies, external auditors, and internal auditors to respond to audits and examinations of the Bank's control environment
Knowledge Sharing: Support the dissemination of knowledge to non-security teams who act as security champions, especially in agile environments
Technology Awareness: Seeking and maintaining knowledge (cross/up-skilling) of current and upcoming IT security technologies
Team Mentorship: Mentor more junior members of the team

Relevant Information

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