Is a "guard" method throwing an exception good practice?

Would the following code be considered a "good" practice?

It's the controller of an RPC endpoint of a package. The idea is to easily override/extend the validation or authorization for a specific project that includes the package.

Could you say that these are guard clauses or methods? Is it a good idea to have a method which only purpose is to check something and throw an exception if something goes wrong?

The code looks clean to me, but I would to get some advice on this :)

public function doSomethingWithCustomer() {
    try {
        $this->validate();
        $this->authorize();
        $customer = $this->resolveCustomer();
        $customer->doSomething();
    } catch (HttpException $e) {
        $this->logger->error($e->getMessage());
        return $this->errorResponse($e->getStatusCode(), $e->getMessage());
    }
}

protected function validate()
{
    // Validate input

    if (!$valid) {
        throw new BadRequestHttpException('Invalid email address');
    }
}

protected function authorize()
{
    // Do some authorization checking

    if ($notAuthorized) {
        throw new AccessDeniedHttpException('Not authorized');
    }
}

protected function resolveCustomer()
{
    $customer = Customer::load(1);

    if (is_null($customer) {
        throw new NotFoundHttpException('Customer not found');
    }

    return $customer;
}