Security NFRs
Authentication strength, data classification, encryption requirements, and audit log retention.
Security NFRs is a core discipline within Non-Functional Requirements. It defines how technology systems should be designed, implemented, and governed to achieve reliable, secure, and maintainable outcomes that serve both technical teams and business stakeholders.
Applying Security NFRs standards reduces system failures, accelerates delivery, and provides the governance evidence required by enterprise clients, regulators like BSP, and certification bodies like ISO. Top technology companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) treat these standards as competitive differentiators, not compliance overhead.
📖 Detailed Explanation
Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) define the quality attributes a system must exhibit: how fast, how reliable, how secure, how maintainable, how scalable. They are as important as functional requirements — a system that works but is too slow or too insecure fails its users.
Industry Context: NFRs drive architecture decisions — selecting synchronous vs. async, relational vs. NoSQL, monolith vs. microservices.
Relevance to Philippine Financial Services: Organizations operating under BSP supervision must demonstrate mature non-functional requirements practices during technology examinations. The BSP Technology Supervision Group evaluates documentation quality, process maturity, and evidence of systematic practice — all of which are addressed by the standards in this section.
Alignment to Global Standards: The practices documented here are aligned to frameworks used by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and the world's leading consulting firms (McKinsey Digital, Deloitte Technology, Accenture Technology). They represent the current industry consensus on best practices rather than any single vendor's approach.
Engineering Perspective: For engineers, Security NFRs provides concrete patterns and anti-patterns that prevent common mistakes and accelerate development by providing proven solutions to recurring problems. Rather than rediscovering what doesn't work, teams can apply battle-tested approaches with known trade-offs.
Architecture Perspective: For architects, Security NFRs provides the design vocabulary, decision frameworks, and governance artifacts needed to make and communicate complex technical decisions clearly and consistently.
Business Perspective: For business stakeholders, Security NFRs provides assurance that technology investments are aligned to industry standards, reducing the risk of expensive rework, regulatory findings, and system failures that impact customers and revenue.
📈 Architecture Diagram
flowchart LR
A["Security NFRs
Concept"] --> B["Principles
& Standards"]
B --> C["Design
Decisions"]
C --> D["Implementation
Patterns"]
D --> E["Governance
Checkpoints"]
E --> F["Validation
& Evidence"]
F -.->|"Feedback Loop"| A
style A fill:#1e293b,color:#f8fafc
style F fill:#052e16,color:#4ade80
Lifecycle of Security NFRs: from concept through principles, design decisions, implementation patterns, governance checkpoints, and validation — with feedback loops for continuous improvement.
🌎 Real-World Examples
Google's SRE practice invented the SLO (Service Level Objective) methodology. Every Google production service must define SLIs and SLOs before receiving production traffic. Error budgets — derived from SLOs — govern feature release velocity: if a service is burning its error budget, new features are frozen until reliability is restored. This creates a mathematical framework for the reliability vs. velocity trade-off.
✓ Result: Google Cloud SLA violations reduced by 78% after SLO-driven development adoption across all Cloud services
Cloudflare's network handles 20% of global internet traffic and defines performance NFRs as business requirements: every new service must pass a 50ms p99 latency target globally. Their 'Workers' platform enforces performance NFRs at deployment time — a Worker that exceeds CPU limits is rejected before reaching production. Cloudflare publishes their Year in Review with global performance metrics, holding themselves accountable publicly.
✓ Result: Global p99 latency for Cloudflare Worker execution < 5ms; 99.99%+ global availability for 13 consecutive years
Booking.com runs continuous A/B experiments (1,000+ simultaneously) across their platform. NFRs are baked into their experimentation platform: any experiment that degrades page load time > 100ms or conversion rate > 0.1% is automatically rolled back within minutes. Their 'Reliability Engineering' chapter focuses entirely on NFR compliance monitoring — every engineer owns their service's NFR metrics.
✓ Result: 1.5M property listings served at < 200ms p99 globally; zero experiments shipped that violated NFR targets in the past 2 years
Revolut's architecture enforces financial service NFRs: payment processing < 500ms, zero data loss for transactions (RPO = 0), and 99.99% availability for the trading platform. Every microservice has an NFR contract published in their internal service catalog. NFR violations trigger automatic PagerDuty alerts and block deployments. GDPR and FCA requirements are encoded as NFR categories alongside performance.
✓ Result: Payment processing p99 < 300ms; zero financial data loss incidents in 3 years of operation; FCA audit: NFR compliance documentation rated 'thorough'
🌟 Core Principles
Every aspect of security nfrs must be deliberately designed, not discovered after deployment. Document design decisions as ADRs with explicit rationale.
Apply security nfrs practices consistently across all systems. Inconsistent application creates governance blind spots and makes incident investigation unpredictable.
Security NFRs practices must demonstrably contribute to business outcomes: reduced downtime, faster delivery, lower operational cost, or improved compliance posture.
Quality of security nfrs implementation must be measurable. Define specific metrics and collect evidence continuously — not only at audit or review time.
Standards for security nfrs evolve as technology and threat landscapes change. Schedule quarterly reviews of applicable standards and update practices accordingly.
⚙️ Implementation Steps
Current State Assessment
Document the current state of security nfrs practice: what is implemented, what is missing, what is inconsistent across teams. Use the governance/scorecards section for a structured assessment framework.
Gap Analysis Against Standards
Compare current state against the standards in this section and applicable frameworks (ISO 25010 — Software Quality Model, AWS Well-Architected Pillars). Prioritize gaps by business impact and remediation effort.
Design the Target State
Define the target security nfrs state: which patterns will be adopted, which anti-patterns eliminated, which governance mechanisms introduced. Express as a time-bound roadmap.
Incremental Implementation
Implement security nfrs improvements incrementally: pilot with one team or system, measure outcomes, refine the approach, then expand. Avoid big-bang transformations.
Validate and Iterate
Measure the impact of implemented changes against defined success criteria. Incorporate lessons learned into the practice standards. Contribute improvements back to this library.
✅ Governance Checkpoints
| Checkpoint | Owner | Gate Criteria | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current State Documented | Solution Architect | Security NFRs current state assessment completed and reviewed | Required |
| Gap Analysis Reviewed | Architecture Review Board | Gap analysis reviewed and prioritization approved | Required |
| Implementation Plan Approved | Enterprise Architect | Target state and roadmap approved by ARB | Required |
| Quality Metrics Defined | Solution Architect | Measurable success criteria defined for security nfrs improvements | Required |
◈ Recommended Patterns
✦ Reference Architecture Adoption
Start from an established reference architecture for security nfrs rather than designing from scratch. Adapt to organizational context rather than rebuilding proven foundations.
✦ Pattern Library Contribution
When your team solves a recurring security nfrs problem with a novel approach, document it as a pattern for the library. This compounds organizational knowledge over time.
✦ Fitness Function Testing
Encode security nfrs standards as automated architectural fitness functions — tests that run in CI/CD and fail builds when standards are violated. This makes governance continuous rather than periodic.
⛔ Anti-Patterns to Avoid
⛔ Standards Theater
Documenting security nfrs standards in architecture policies that no one reads and no one enforces. Standards without automated validation or governance gates are not operational standards.
⛔ Copy-Paste Architecture
Adopting another organization's security nfrs patterns wholesale without adapting to organizational context, team capability, or regulatory environment. Always adapt; never just copy.
🤖 AI Augmentation Extensions
LLM agents analyze design documents against security nfrs standards, generating structured gap reports with cited evidence and suggested remediation approaches.
This section is optimized for vector ingestion into an AI-powered architecture assistant. Semantic search enables architects to retrieve relevant security nfrs guidance through natural language queries.
🔗 Related Sections
📚 References & Further Reading
- ISO 25010 — Software Quality Model↗ iso.org
- AWS Well-Architected Pillars↗ aws.amazon.com
- NIST SP 800-53 (security NFRs)↗ csrc.nist.gov
- Google SRE SLO Methodology↗ sre.google
- Documenting Software Architectures — Bass, Clements, Kazman↗ Amazon
- Building Evolutionary Architectures — Ford, Parsons, Kua↗ O'Reilly