Designing secure systems means weighing a variety of architectural considerations, and in this episode, we begin by focusing on availability, resilience, and cost. We explain how availability is maintained through redundancy, failover configurations, and distributed services, while resilience involves the system’s ability to recover gracefully from disruptions without loss of integrity or function. These traits are not accidental—they must be engineered deliberately into infrastructure design, including how load is balanced, how data is replicated, and how dependencies are isolated. However, adding resilience and availability often comes at a financial cost, and budget constraints may require teams to make strategic trade-offs between perfect redundancy and acceptable risk. We explore scenarios where choosing one form of protection over another impacts both operational reliability and threat posture. In cybersecurity, architecture isn’t just about capability—it’s about aligning risk tolerance, recovery goals, and resource allocation to support both business continuity and defense.