And these losses are not limited to monetary damages. The reputational harm and downtime caused by incidents can be catastrophic, especially for organizations that rely heavily on uninterrupted digital services.

The growing cyber threat landscape

Last year there were 2,365 cyberattacks, with 343,338,964 victims, and 72% increase in data breaches since 2021, which held the previous all-time record. Threat actors are targeting not only large corporations but also small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are often viewed as easy targets due to their limited resources. With the rise of ransomware, phishing schemes, and advanced persistent threats (APTs), businesses need to adopt a proactive, multi-layered approach to cybersecurity.

However, protecting against modern cyber threats requires more than just basic firewalls and antivirus software. It demands a holistic strategy that addresses vulnerabilities across all layers of an organization’s infrastructure – from its internet domain to its critical applications and systems.

How can businesses stay ahead of cyber threats?

To effectively combat these threats, companies need to build their cybersecurity framework around industry best practices, such as the NIST Framework, which emphasizes these key pillars:

• Govern: Stablish a risk management strategy, expectations, and policy.
• Identify: Understand your assets and risks.
• Protect: Implement safeguards to ensure essential service delivery.
• Detect: Recognize cybersecurity threats in real time.
• Respond: Take action to mitigate attacks as they happen.
• Recover: Ensure the business can quickly resume operations after an incident.

While this framework is critical, its materialization requires the right tools and expertise. This is where Link’s Atlas Risk Secure solution comes into play.

Atlas Risk Secure: A 360º approach to cybersecurity

Combining the deep experience in this area with its enterprise architecture proven know-how, Link has developed Atlas Risk Secure, an integrated and 360º solution designed to help businesses mitigate cyber risks and maintain the security of their digital assets. Atlas Risk Secure addresses vulnerabilities across multiple layers, ensuring a comprehensive defense against cyber threats.

Here’s how Atlas Risk Secure helps your organization stay protected:

1. Three layers of protection

• Domain Level: Detects and responds to malicious activities such as phishing attempts and impersonation schemes targeting your organization’s internet domain. By neutralizing these threats, the solution enhances the safety of online interactions.
• Application Level: Atlas Risk Secure continuously scans for vulnerabilities in your applications, providing real-time alerts when issues are detected. This enables swift remediation and minimizes the risk of application-layer breaches.
• Host and System Level: Monitors your operating systems and devices, detecting vulnerabilities and attacks. With near-instant response times, the system acts immediately to prevent further damage and ensure operational continuity.

2. Comprehensive Risk Management

Atlas Risk Secure goes beyond simple detection and response. Its advanced risk management capabilities allow organizations to configure a complete risk assessment framework tailored to their business needs. By mapping out the infrastructure and business dependencies, it identifies how vulnerabilities in one area could affect the entire organization. This holistic view enables to proactively manage risks, reducing the chances of critical incidents that could disrupt operations.

3. Automation and proactive alerts

With automation built into its core, Atlas Risk Secure automatically scans your infrastructure for vulnerabilities and propagates risks through your business architecture. It delivers automated risk assessments, enabling quick decision-making, and sends proactive alerts based on risk levels, ensuring you’re always one step ahead of potential threats.

4. NIST-compliant

Atlas Risk Secure aligns with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, supporting its key pillars. This ensures that your strategy adheres to international best practices and provides thorough coverage across your entire digital ecosystem.

Atlas Risk Secure is already helping numerous businesses prevent cyberattacks and manage risks. By leveraging its Security Operations Center (SOC) for continuous monitoring, organizations can detect potential threats before they escalate, significantly reducing downtime and ensuring the safety of their critical systems.

Why choose Atlas Risk Secure?

The current threat landscape demands a dynamic and flexible approach to cybersecurity. Unlike traditional solutions, Atlas Risk Secure adapts to the unique requirements of each organization. It not

only mitigates risks but also ensures compliance with legal requirements through automated reporting and audits.

With its ability to seamlessly integrate with your existing infrastructure and provide real-time insights, Atlas Risk Secure empowers your organization to:

• Stay compliant with evolving regulations
• Protect sensitive data from breaches
• Minimize operational disruptions due to cyberattacks
• Enhance overall business resilience

The consequences of inaction are too great, as data breaches and cyberattacks continue to rise. With Link’s Atlas Risk Secure, your organization will be equipped with the tools and knowledge to protect against current and future threats, ensuring that your business not only survives but thrives in an increasingly hostile cyber landscape. Don’t wait until it’s too late.

Ask for a demo and secure your future today.

Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD) embarked on a refresh of its enterprise architecture strategy with a goal of rationalizing applications and to reduce operational cost and improve time-to-market. The industry specificity and comprehensive definitions offered by the BIAN framework (Banking Industry Architecture Network) meant it was the obvious choice for delivering tangible value to the bank’s initiative and SAP LeanIX Enterprise Architecture platform was the chosen solution to consolidate this process. 

As the largest Portuguese bank, CGD plays a central role in Portugal’s financial system, offering a wide range of banking services. CGD had an extensive estate spanning over 700 applications in its legacy systems. Leveraging Link Consulting specialist skills as BIAN subject matter experts, as well as SAP LeanIX implementation expertise, the team continues to conduct a thorough mapping exercise of application names, descriptions, and functionalities.

This is leading to a clear roadmap for change which reduces both costs and operational risks by identifying duplicated functionality and migrating workflows to a more streamlined and integrated architecture. This has been made possible through the use of the BIAN Service Domain model, which provides the canvas against which all applications can be mapped and classified in a transparent and collaborative way.

Following a successful, on time and on budget first tranche of mapping, CGD is now planning a broader second phase, using a BIAN-driven methodology and SAP LeanIX capabilities, to cover API specifications as well as applications.

According to Paulo Pereira,  Architecture Director at Caixa Geral de Depósitos, “Tackling a project of this scope, in tranches that make sense for the business’s goals, might not have been possible without the underlying understanding provided by the BIAN Service Domain model and SAP LeanIX platform.”

Know more about our expertise in financial services and get in touch if you also want to elevate your business with state-of-the-art architectures and tools.

The Triennial Conference of the DLM Forum, recently held in Salamanca, Spain on October 23rd and 24th, addressed the crucial issue of preserving our digital heritage. Hosted by the General Archive of the State of Spain and Umbus S.L., the event brought together experts, archivists, and stakeholders to discuss the ever-present challenges of preserving and connecting data in the digital society.

The main theme of the conference was appropriately titled “Preserving and Connecting: Data in the Digital Society.” Participants examined the role of archives and institutions in safeguarding digital records and ensuring the continuity of our digital heritage in an era where information is increasingly created and stored in digital formats.

One of the notable highlights of the conference was the presentation of ATLAS, a project aimed at automating the ingestion of data sources and generating artifacts of Enterprise Architecture Electronic Archiving (AE). This cutting-edge technology promises to revolutionize the preservation and management of digital records, offering more efficient and comprehensive solutions for archivists and organizations dealing with the challenges of preserving digital data.

During the event, a segment of the ATLAS presentation was showcased, giving participants a glimpse of the project’s innovative approach to harmonizing model-based e-Archiving approaches. The presentation, “Harmonizing Model-Based Approaches to Electronic Archiving,” revealed how ATLAS can streamline the complex process of preserving digital records and ensuring their accessibility for future generations.

The conference also provided an opportunity for participants to discuss the importance of international cooperation and standards in the field of digital preservation. As digital data becomes increasingly essential to our society, the need for a cohesive and robust approach to preservation is more critical than ever.

To learn more about the discussions and presentations at the Triennial Conference of the DLM Forum, you can access the program details at this link.

The conference’s focus on preserving digital heritage highlights the importance of our collective efforts to safeguard the wealth of information that defines our modern world. As technology evolves, events like these provide a platform for experts to share knowledge and explore innovative solutions, ensuring that our digital legacy endures for future generations.

More Information: Atlas

The Recovery and Resilience Plan brings a great opportunity for the country, but also a huge challenge – particularly for public entities. Ambitious, both in number and size of the projects, the PRR will call for a great capacity for coordination and planning from the agencies involved.

The bar is set high – but fortunately, there are technological tools that can be of great help. One of these is Atlas.

Link Consulting’s Business Architecture solution is designed to simplify even the most complex management. In the case of public entities, all activities within the scope of the PRR can be mapped, showing how they connect and how they align with the goals of the Plan.

Thanks to this integrated vision, planning and management are greatly simplified. Atlas makes resource and technology needs visible, mitigating risks and monitoring the progress of each initiative. It also ensures easier compliance with government laws or guidelines. As well as detecting conflicts or overlaps between projects and making the necessary adjustments.

Visual, user-friendly and configurable, Atlas is the must-have tool to handle the complexity of PRR. Ensuring that resources are used efficiently, transparently and seamlessly. And helping public entities to be up to the opportunity – and the challenge.

Want to know more in detail how Atlas can help managing PRR initiatives? Ask now for a demonstration.

Taking advantage of the existing capabilities of ATLAS to represent a complete view of any company’s architectures and “artifacts,” LINK implemented an integration engine with several opensource SW for infrastructure devices detection and monitoring, automatically feeding ATLAS with all the “physical” artifacts (devices) and their availabilities.

Moreover, and of the utmost relevance, the integration with vulnerabilities detection SW, allows institutions to adopt a truly preventive approach to cybersecurity risks, driving best-of-bread and tested solution recommendations.

This holistic view of risks incurred (those resulting from detected vulnerabilities) and the defined enterprise architectures allow to drive an impact propagation of these risks, from physical devices to the supported applications to the business services supported by those applications.

Based on each business service criticality, ATLAS can automatically classify risk severity, helping the cybersecurity responsible address the more critical risks first.

Author:
Arnaldo Moreira
Program Manager

Combining our collaborative business processes discovery and enrichment solution with the ability to produce on-the-fly prototyped business processes that are executable and could be really experimented by stakeholders leverage a whole new way of achieving a common understanding among all the project’ participants. Furthermore, our solution allows the dynamic adjustment of business processes design, for instance, adding a rejection situation, and then an immediate prototype’ update is delivered and ready to be experimented again.

Let us have a look at a step by step example:

1. Design your business elements in Atlas collaborative canvas

Atlas collaborative canvas allows discovering your business process [1], capturing the specific details from the business perspective using a simplified business language composed only by the involved actors, the activities each actor is responsible for, and the events triggering the collaboration between actors. A collaborative canvas facilitates the drag and drop of elements directly to any actor (see Figure 1) without the need to learn a new specification language. Moreover, you can specify the business objects that are already identified as being of core importance for your business.

Misalignments and misunderstandings are easier to identify and solve due to the simple representation used.  Discovery also enables the communication between business analysts working remotely, avoiding the exchange of multiple business process models but providing a single point of trust.

Figure 1. ATLAS collaborative canvas.

2. Generate the happy-flow business process model in BPMN

The provided detail in this collaborative canvas is used to discover the existing business transactions between actors on the fly automatically (see Figure 2) using the language most widely used by industry – the BPMN specification language [2].

Therefore, discovery facilitates creating a shared semantic understanding between the different business analysts of an organization. A change in business is only a matter of changing the canvas and re-generating the BPMN model.

Figure 2. Viewing the generated happy flow in BPMN.

3. Export the BPMN model and deploy it in the Camunda engine

Next, load the BPMN model (see Figure 3) in Camunda modeller (provided by the Camunda Platform Community edition) and then deploy it. The deployed model can be consulted in the camunda cockpit (see Figure 4). Integrations of Atlas with other platforms are foreseen.

Figure 3. Loading the BPMN model and deploying in an execution engine

Figure 4. Listing all the deployed BPMN models.

4. Instantiate the deployed BPMN model and try it

This is the step where you are able to experiment directly with your generated business processes without any interference. To that end, instantiate the BPMN model (see Figure 5) and use Camunda tasklist and Camunda cockpit to follow its execution (see Figure 6). We also suggest you to view the brief demonstration that is available in movie format here.

Figure 5.Viewing the execution state of each business process instance.

Figure 6. Consulting the user assigned task list

5. Enrich the happy-flow business process model

After that, the business process enrichment generates a business process model enriched with an inherited business process pattern [3]. In step 2, the model discovered is only based on the elements previously captured in Atlas collaborative canvas, but it could now be extended by the choice of the business analyst (see in Figure 7). Enrichment leverages a controlled and known management effort to increase the complexity of the designed business processes.

With enrichment, the exceptions situations can be added to the model by request and on the fly. It is also recognized that BPMN defines clearly how to articulate its concepts but usually involves the investment of learning a new language that entails extra costs. With this approach, learning BPMN is needless.

Figure 7. Business process enrichment, selecting the desired extensions to generate a new enriched model

6. Repeat steps 2. to 5. as you need, with this on-the-fly prototyping creation solution.

A brief demonstration is also available in movie format here.

We are available to discuss how this solution can be used in the context of your organization’s business processes. Please contact us by email at hyperautomation@linkconsulting.com

SOURCES:

[1] ATLAS Link Consulting (2021). https://linkconsulting.com/linkconsulting/what-we-do/products/atlas8/

[2] BPMN 2.0.2 specification (2011). URL https://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0.2/PDF

[3] Guerreiro, S., & Sousa, P. (2020). A framework to semantify BPMN models using DEMO business transaction pattern, eprint=2012.09557, https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.09557

Common sense says that planning is to detail the path between the current state, which we will call and AS-IS, and the intended state, TO-BE. Atlas solution, from Link, allows precisely to provide reliable information about the state of the organization that is emerging, resulting from the progress and changes of ongoing project and plans of projects in the pipeline. Only in this way will we be able to provide the necessary and accurate information for planning the next wave of projects.

The current pace of change requires agile planning and architecture methods, which are not compatible with the traditional approach to static documentation and disconnected from reality. This is so much important as the speed of change, the extent of transformation and the scarcity of resources for the recurrent adaptation of planning and architecture future projects.

The lack of agile planning and architecture methods can be compared to driving a car at speed just by looking at a picture of the road from the past (looking backwards) or even the preset (looking down to the road under the car). Instead, we drive with our eyes set to the car near future position, few tens of meters or a few seconds ahead in time, in what we call the can emerging position if no abrupt decisions are taken, as breaking.

Although developing new applications is getting easier and faster every day, we know how common the IT projects to go over the planned budget and deadlines, becoming elements of risk for the processing and digitization of organizations.

Planning a project to transform an organization is always difficult due to the multiple variables to consider, particularly IT, which easily grows in complexity.  One of the main causes is the lack of instruments to deal with this complexity. Common sense says that planning is to detail the path between the current state, which we will call and AS-IS, and the intended state, TO-BE.

In general, we can say that all organizations have a sense of AS-IS and TO-BE when drawing up their multi-annual transformation plans. With higher or lower detail, they know their current state and where they want to go.

However, for planning transformation initiatives, or projects, knowledge of the current state is manifestly insufficient. Take as an example that we are today planning an integration project that will start in 4 months. By then, there are several projects to finish whose results change the integration scenarios of our project. To plan our integration project, we do not need the organization’s current state, as it is and will be changed until the beginning of our project, but rather the state of the organization at the beginning of our project.

But what tools does management put at the disposal of project´s teams to figure out the state of the organization at the time of the beginning of their projects? Usually none! Instead, they make up meetings with teams of other projects they believe might impact their project. This requires a lot of effort and time that we don’t typically have. In addition, “word of mouth” and the use of Excel sheets as an almost universal tool for transferring this information at meetings is very error-prone and time-consuming.

Even if we have all the information from other projects about the changes they will bring about in the coming months relevant to our project, such information might change in the meantime due to unforeseen situations in other project´s execution. So, what tools we have to help to foresee the state of the organization at the beginning of our project so that one can plan our project with reliable, or as reliable as possible, information? The traditional is to have meetings and more meetings…

In practice, statistics point that at least 20% of the projects go over budget and time due to the lack of accurate information during the planning. The difficulty in collecting worthy information is, in fact, the reason why we find many organizations that plan projects in two phases: A very preliminary one a few months in advance and another more detailed one at the project start. Naturally, when the project starts, we will have less time and options to choose from than if we had the same information months before.

The organization cartography solution Atlas from Link allows accurately provide reliable information about this from the organization that is emerging, resulting from the progress and the changes in the implementation of projects in the pipeline. Only in this way will we be able to provide the necessary information for planning the projects that follow.

To this end, Atlas is prepared to receive information over the whole cycle of systems development, from planning to deployment:

• From the ongoing projects’ progress, through integration with project management solutions to obtain information on the respective milestones;
• From the artefacts that are being developed, through interaction with development environments and pipelines CICD in each project;
• From discovering the artefacts deployed in each production infrastructure, whether in the cloud, VMware or standalone servers.

All this information is collected and presented on architectural maps with a time bar that allows the navigation from the past to the present and the emerging future organization state based on current project execution. In addition, it interacts with project teams both to notify changes that have an impact on their projects and also to request the necessary information to infer dependencies between projects.

The more the management values adherence with planned budget risks, costs and deadlines, the easier it is to have reliable information for planning the following projects and the fewer surprises they will have.

For more information, contact us by email.

AUTHOR:

Pedro Sousa, Atlas Director at Link. Associated Professor of Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Management and Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico

14/05/2021

The increasing demand for business processes automation is leveraging the offering of new hyperautomated solutions that can minimize the time to market for deploying complex business processes. Hyperautomated solutions are facing a challenging landscape. On the one hand, business processes requirements changes are continuously imposed, and fast adaptations are expected to maintain their value. On the other hand, to be compliant with those evolving requirements, a huge number of possible design combinations for complete business processes are possible. The explosion of the number of those possible combinations hinders its development, management, and deployment. To avoid the impact of this combinatorial effect in the organization budget, only the simplest business processes scenarios are considered, and other advanced forms of exception handling are postponed to the implementation phase or even disregarded. To make it even more challenging, teams are working remotely, and all the collaboration, discussion, design and transformation need to be done in a distributed manner.

The usual solution encompasses a sequential and manual process of elicitation and design of the most relevant business processes using a business dependent language. A high-level design is produced containing a partial view (also named as the “happy flow”) of the enterprise operation. Then, business processes are implemented in a software platform using a technology-dependent language. At this stage, revocations, declinations, rejections, and others non “happy flow” patterns are adhoc included with a huge increase in complexity and unmanageability. Moreover, whenever a change in the implementation is needed, it turns too tricky to trace it back to the initial business definition. Concomitantly, a change in business does not trace back to the implementation. A re-elicitation, re-design and re-implementation are required. The effort consumed with these non-integrated solutions is high and not controlled in terms of costs.

Our solution offers a business processes models automatic completion, in a systematic manner, so that models can describe far more situations with few extra managed complexity. ATLAS hyperautomated solution natively copes with change. It can accelerate the modelling and enhance the organization’s complex business processes portfolio whenever any operational condition changes. It encompasses a two stages solution that is demonstrated herein, firstly the business process discovery and secondly the business process enrichment. ATLAS from Link Consulting [1] is the product that supports this solution grounded on the new abilities offered by the business processes semantics theory [3].

Business process discovery captures the specific details from the business perspective using a simplified business language composed only by the involved actors, the activities each actor is responsible for, and the events triggering the collaboration between actors. A collaborative canvas facilitates the drag and drop of elements directly to any actor (see Figure 1) without the need to learn a new specification language. The provided detail in this collaborative canvas is used to discover the existing business transactions between actors on the fly automatically. Therefore, discovery facilitates creating a shared semantic understanding between the different business analysts of an organization. A change in business is only a matter of changing the canvas and re-generating the business transactions.

Figure 1. ATLAS Collaborative canvas to capture the business elements.

Misalignments and misunderstandings are easier to identify and solve due to the simple representation used.  On top of this, the discovery also enables the communication between business analysts working in remote environments, avoiding the exchange of business process models, but providing a single point of trust.

After that, the business process enrichment generates a business process model using the language most widely used by industry – the BPMN specification language [2] – combined with an inherited complete business process pattern [3]. This generated model shares a single interpretation between multiple business analysts and supports the execution of the business processes in any BPMN compatible engine (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. ATLAS Automatic business process discovered from the elements of Figure 1.

Initially, the model discovered is only based on the elements previously captured, but it could be extended later by choosing the business analyst (see in Figure 3). That is why it is only required a controlled and known management effort to increase the complexity of the designed business processes.

Figure 3. ATLAS Business process enrichment, selecting the desired extensions to generate a new enriched model.

Furthermore, exceptions situations can be added to the model by request and on the fly. It is also recognized that BPMN defines clearly how to articulate its concepts but usually involves the investment of learning a new language that entails extra costs. With this approach learning BPMN is needless. In addition, BPMN does not guarantee that one model is complete. With the semantified pattern that we use, our solution delivers a full hyperautomated business process discovery and enrichment to be used in a remote work environment.

We are available to discuss how this solution can be used in the context of the business processes of your organization. Please contact us by email at hyperautomation@linkconsulting.com

SOURCES:

[1] ATLAS Link Consulting (2021). https://linkconsulting.com/linkconsulting/what-we-do/products/atlas8/

[2] BPMN 2.0.2 specification (2011). URL https://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0.2/PDF

[3] Guerreiro, S., & Sousa, P. (2020). A framework to semantify BPMN models using DEMO business transaction pattern, eprint=2012.09557, https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.09557

AUTHORS:

Sérgio Guerreiro, Enterprise Engineering; Enterprise Architecture at Link and Assistant Professor of Information Systems at Instituto Superior Técnico

Pedro Sousa, Atlas Director at Link. Associated Professor of Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Management and Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico

José Teixeira, Financial Services Industry Director at Link

04/05/2021

A knowledge repository which allows to maintain catalogs and processes, information, services, systems, and technologies architectures, as well as their multiple dependencies.
With a totally configurable metamodel, Atlas maintains the information of any organizational artifact and any kind of dependency between them.

An information gatherer based on a pre-configured transformation engine which solves the most frequent situations for collecting and uploading information , offering object transformation mechanisms of import/export according to the mapping of the source metamodels and the target metamodel.

A complex dependency viewer made to generate real-time and up-to-date architectural representations which are easily navigable not only in space (between representations), but also in time (all representations have a time control allowing its content to be viewed in different time periods).

An instrument of communication between different departments inside the organization. The capability to standardize architecture views depending on the stakeholder profile, also standardize how stakeholders communicate.

An instrument for supporting decision not only when designing future solutions, but also when mitigating inherent impacts of each transformation initiative.

Atlas replaces the EAMS (Enterprise Architecture Management System) by Link Consulting.

Atlas is supports all EAMS configurations and repositories.

More information.

SPMS adopted Atlas as a registration solution and application systems architecture, aiming to monitor all systems as well as their interdependencies, in an effort to conduct impact analysis and comparisons amongst the different entities. For example, which hospitals use a specific solution and what are the dependencies of other systems in each Hospital.

With the Atlas solution, SMPS is capable of managing them from development to production inputs for each system based on the knowledge acquired about the dependencies between the different systems

The Atlas solution helps in reducing the maintenance effort of this entire collection of information because the process of capturing and generating architectural views can be strongly automated, thanks to the flexibility of the Atlas solution both in terms of representation and in terms of integration with other systems

More information.