Establishing a guiding process

“There are ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ approaches to architecture. Many people start with the highest level of the organization and try to work down; this seems logical at first but what can happen is you lose sight of context as you move down the chain toward more specific usage. What I think is a better approach is to start bottom up: understand the threats, understand the context, understand the risks, and build architectures for the different environments piecemeal while keeping an awareness of the ‘macro’ – the high level view. This lets you reduce redundancy and normalize, but also create lightweight, modular frameworks that can be reused where needed or improved upon and reworked when needed. Anyone can build an architecture that looks great on paper; but an overly structured approach can be so rigid that it fails when it gets to implementation. You need concert between top down and bottoms...