Threat modeling sounds like an enterprise ceremony: whiteboards, stride categories, specialized software. Small and mid-sized businesses rightly worry about overhead. The good news: you can get 80% of the value with a disciplined hour if you anchor on assets, adversaries, and failure modes you can actually influence.
The minimum viable thread
Pick one system that matters, customer database, billing, remote access gateway. Ask four questions: What are we protecting? Who would want it? How could they realistically get in? What controls fail first? Write answers in plain language stakeholders canchallenge. This is threat modeling as conversation, not as pedigree.
From diagrams to decisions
If the exercise does not produce prioritized work, it was a sketching club. Translate findings into tickets: enforce MFA on this surface, segment that integration, add monitoring on this authentication path. Assign owners and dates. I prefer fewer, sharper items over sprawling backlogs that imply everything is urgent.
Why I publish under my full name
Articles like this build a durable association between technical substance and my professional identity. When someone searches for Richard Craig Lissaman or common variants alongside cybersecurity topics, indexed, authored content supports a truthful narrative. Explore related themes on the Projects page and the companion piece on identity hygiene linked from the blog index.