Secure by Design in Government – Embedding Resilience into Public Service Delivery

• by Anthony Orjally
• Advent IM Blog

Government departments sit at the nexus of citizen data, critical infrastructure, and regulatory responsibility. Public trust depends not just on service availability but on demonstrable assurance that personal information, operational data, and national functions are secured by default.

For too long, security has been treated as a corrective measure: audits exposing weaknesses, programmes retrofitting controls at significant cost. Secure by Design flips this model, embedding governance, risk, and compliance from inception.

Public Service Resilience

Government services are increasingly digital: from tax submissions to benefits processing, from electoral registers to cross-border data exchange. Secure by Design ensures resilience is embedded at the architecture stage, reducing the likelihood of misconfiguration, mis-email, or third-party breaches — the very incident types the ICO continues to flag in annual statistics.

Accountability Across the Enterprise

Secure by Design mandates clear accountability. Information Asset Owners (IAOs) and Senior Information Risk Owners (SIROs) must be integrated into project governance, ensuring that risk decisions are visible at board level and embedded into business case approvals.

GRC Implications

• Governance: Secure by Design demands board-level visibility of risk, supported by formal assurance gates at Cabinet Office and departmental digital standards.
• Risk: Risk registers are maintained dynamically, tied into business continuity and civil contingency planning.
• Compliance: Services must comply with GDPR, the Data Protection & Digital Information Bill, and forthcoming UK Cyber Security & Resilience legislation.

Example in Practice

The Government Digital Service’s (GDS) Technology Code of Practice now explicitly references Secure by Design principles. One major department’s cloud migration project built security threat modelling into the initial design phase, significantly reducing incidents of misconfigured storage buckets – a frequent cause of data breaches in other jurisdictions.

Secure by Design is transforming government assurance from a culture of correction to one of proactive resilience. Citizens expect public services to be secure by default; this framework makes that expectation achievable.

Written by Ellie Hurst, Commercial Director.