The Six Domain Defense Strategy is CDA's approach to achieving comprehensive cybersecurity coverage by ensuring defensive investments, operations, and measurements span all six Planetary Defense Model domains simultaneously. Rather than sequentially addressing security functions, this strategy recognizes that adversaries attack across multiple domains concurrently and defenders must maintain parallel coverage to prevent gaps that sophisticated threat actors exploit.
The strategy maps all security capabilities to one or more of the six PDM domains: DPS (data protection), VSD (vulnerability and surface defense), SPH (security posture and hygiene), IAT (identity and access), TID (threat intelligence), and RGA (risk and governance). Organizations assess their current maturity in each domain through FRM assessments that produce domain-specific scores. The strategy then prioritizes investments to address the weakest domains first while maintaining existing capabilities in stronger areas. Cross-domain dependencies are explicitly mapped -- for example, strong IAT (identity) reduces VSD (surface) exposure, while strong TID (intelligence) improves SPH (posture) decision-making. Progress is measured through domain-specific metrics that aggregate into an overall security posture score.
Adversaries do not respect organizational silos. A sophisticated attack might combine credential theft (IAT), vulnerability exploitation (VSD), lateral movement across poorly monitored segments (SPH), and data exfiltration (DPS) in a single operation. Organizations that excel in three domains but neglect the others remain vulnerable to attacks that traverse their weak points. The six-domain strategy prevents this by ensuring minimum viable coverage across all domains before pursuing excellence in any single domain.
The Six Domain Defense Strategy is the PDM in action. CDA's Theater missions, Institute courses, and Arena metrics all organize around these six domains, creating a unified measurement framework that reveals exactly where an organization stands and what missions will most efficiently improve their overall defensive posture.