Will the Adoption of Digital Engineering Improve Our Ability to Address Cyber Threats?

There is great potential for digital engineering to integrate the wide range of technical activities that occur throughout an acquisition, including cybersecurity to address the growing cyber threat landscape. Digital engineering leverages digital models instead of documents to achieve coordination when designing, developing, and maintaining a system. The concept of a shared model that is used by the enterprise architect, system architect, software architect, cyber threat analysts, and operational sustainment eliminates the gaps and potential misunderstandings that can occur when the many levels of abstraction needed to build and sustain a system live in separate silos. Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is a subset of digital engineering that uses models to manage a system throughout the lifecycle. Integrating MBSE with the Agile approach used for DevSecOps allows continuous refinement to occur at each level of abstraction in a way that enables all participants to keep current with changing business requirements and changing threat concerns. All participants using this approach must focus on creating and refining the model to meet requirements and collaborate across the many shared views of the system.