Monolithic Siloed Application

reference-architecture

Diagram

Description

This reference architecture depictsa rudimentary legacy application with no native integration with modern IAM capabilities.

As such it would pose a significant challenge to manage and secure. Since most organizations with some historical IT background have similar applications in practice, it is of interest to discuss how such an application could be efficiently managed and effectively secured.

The second interesting aspect of this reference architecture is its simplicity. Such a monolithic siloed application is nearly atomic and thus represent a fundamental architectural structure.

Identity and Access Governance

Theme

Situation

Possible Approaches

Theme

Situation

Possible Approaches

Acquisition

In view of its absence of native IAM integrations, this application will suffer from a low-grade security posture and high maintenance costs.

An alternative application should be considered and contact should be taken with the editor to gain visibility on its development roadmap.

Authentication

Natively, the application only supports password-based authentication.

To implement more robust authentication mechanisms and/or implement SSO, application virtualization may be an option.

Password Policy

The application supports the configuration of a password policy.

Align it to your organization’s password policy.

Access Model

The application supports the direct granting of fine-grained entitlements to identities and/or their grouping into roles.

A typical best practice is to avoid direct fine-grained access permissions and systematically grant access permissions via roles. Application roles may then be mapped to IAG entitlements or roles.

Provisioning

The absence of native IAM integrations gives no choice but to provision and administer the application manually.

A typical SoD requirement is to enforce segregation between application provisioners, administrators, and functional users.

Reconciliation

The absence of an API makes it impossible to automatically reconcile this application with IAG authorizations.

Include this application in your manual application reconciliation control plan with frequency proportionate to its sensitivity.

PAM

No native support for PAM solutions.

Applicative administration may be forced via a bastion. Password automatic rotation will require client-side scripting which comes with additional development and maintenance costs. The possibility of bypassing the bastion must be analyzed, especially if the administration and functional clients share the same protocols. If bastion bypass cannot be technically avoided.

Logging

The absence of logging features makes this application isolated from your SIEM.

This may be partially compensated with logging and event correlation at the client, application virtualization, and/or server level.

 


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