Independent security architecture consultancy
MBUA provides IT, OT and cloud security architecture, assurance and delivery support for regulated and mission-critical organisations. The work concentrates on the boundaries where risk actually sits, and on making the trade-offs explicit enough for engineering, security and executive stakeholders to agree on.
Industrial data reaches enterprise and cloud platforms through a single brokered, inspected path at the controlled boundary. No inbound route is created into the control network.
Expertise
Most serious risk in converged environments sits at the joins: between plant and enterprise networks, between production systems and cloud analytics, and between teams that measure success differently. MBUA works specifically at those boundaries.
Services
Engagements are typically senior and specific: a design that needs challenging, a boundary that needs defining, or a governance process that needs to hold. Each can be scoped as an assessment, a design engagement, or ongoing architectural oversight.
Plant and enterprise networks have usually grown together without a designed boundary, so a change on one side creates unmanaged exposure on the other. MBUA defines zones, conduits and trust boundaries that hold under real operating conditions.
Outcome: A target architecture, and a sequence for reaching it without stopping production.
Cloud adoption tends to outrun the security model around it. Landing zones, identity, network paths and data flows are reviewed and designed as one architecture rather than a set of separate decisions.
Outcome: A hybrid design that is coherent, reviewable and consistent with existing controls.
Operational data is needed for analytics, but the route it takes is often improvised. Integration is designed around brokered, one-directional patterns using technologies such as MQTT and OPC UA.
Outcome: Production data reaches analytics platforms without opening a path back into control systems.
A design that has never been challenged is a risk carried into delivery. Proposed architectures are reviewed against threat, regulatory and operational constraints, and the findings are written for both engineers and decision-makers.
Outcome: Clear findings, prioritised remediation, and a defensible position at the next gate.
Flat networks and inherited privilege are the two conditions that turn a contained incident into an operational one. Segmentation and access models are designed together, because separating them rarely works.
Outcome: Segmentation and access control that administrators and operators can actually run.
Without a design authority, standards drift and every project re-decides the same questions. MBUA establishes or strengthens governance forums, review criteria and decision records.
Outcome: Consistent decisions, a documented rationale, and fewer late architectural surprises.
Availability targets are often stated but rarely designed for end to end. Failure modes, dependencies and recovery paths are assessed across the platforms production relies on.
Outcome: An availability design matched to the consequence of failure, not to a default figure.
Tests scoped without architectural context confirm what is already known and miss what matters. MBUA scopes testing against the real architecture and assesses whether remediation has genuinely closed the finding.
Outcome: Testing aimed at material risk, and evidence to support go/no-go decisions.
Delivery
The right shape for architecture work depends on what the organisation already has. MBUA is engaged in whichever of the following forms fits the problem.
Engagements may be delivered directly by MBUA’s principal consultant or supported by selected associates whose experience matches the scope, sector and technical environment. Who will carry out the work, and in what role, is agreed before an engagement begins.
Track record
The figures below reflect outcomes from programmes delivered by MBUA’s principal consultant across different organisations, sectors and technical environments. Each represents a distinct programme of work and demonstrates experience delivering complex technical and operational change. They are presented as evidence of delivery experience, not as commitments, targets or guarantees for future engagements.
These are historical outcomes from delivered programmes. Results in any new organisation will depend on its systems, constraints, priorities and operating environment, and would be assessed and scoped as part of the engagement.
Engagement examples
These examples are drawn from the principal consultant’s previous roles and programmes rather than from contracts delivered by MBUA. Client names, systems and locations are not published; each describes the type of problem, the architectural approach taken, and the result.
Regulated manufacturing
Industrial and manufacturing data
Regulated enterprise
Principal consultant’s credentials
The credentials below are held by MBUA’s principal consultant: chartered engineering status alongside recognised security and architecture certifications covering enterprise information security, industrial control systems and architecture method. They are not a statement about any other individual who may support an engagement.
Certification marks are the property of their respective bodies and are named here for identification only. Where an associate supports an engagement, their relevant credentials are confirmed as part of scoping. Verification can be provided on request.
Approach
MBUA is a specialist consultancy in IT, OT and cloud security architecture. The work is deliberately narrow: architecture, assurance and the delivery support needed to see a design through, for organisations where the consequences of getting it wrong are operational as well as commercial.
MBUA was established by Mohbob Ali CEng CISSP, a security and solutions architect with more than 20 years of experience across engineering, industrial automation, enterprise technology and regulated environments — including financial services, pharmaceutical manufacturing, regulated manufacturing and industrial operations.
That background began on the plant floor, with programmable logic controllers and instrumentation, and developed into enterprise architecture and security work spanning IT, OT, Azure cloud and hybrid infrastructure, identity and access management, application security, network segmentation, firewall policy, enterprise integration, architecture governance and resilience. The combination is deliberately unusual: few security architects have spent years writing control logic, and few automation engineers have run an enterprise design authority.
The principal consultant’s credentials are listed above. Where an associate supports an engagement, their experience is matched to the scope and confirmed during scoping.
Contact
Whether it is a segmentation programme, a cloud integration that needs to be defensible, or a design that should be challenged before it goes further, the first step is a conversation with MBUA about scope and fit.
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