Hosted Architecture

The Azure cloud hosted deployment architecture for the Identity Panel Suite is designed to achieve the following goals:

• Security: Every component of the solution must consider security first.
• Fault tolerance: The solution must support operational high availability with a 99.95% target overall application availability SA. The application should have live zone-redundancy with zero downtime resilience to data-center impacting events. The application must also have cross-region backup for recovery from major disasters within the target RTO of 24 hours.
• Performance: The solution must provide quick responsiveness and perform well for customers with large data sets (up to 750,000 users on standard deployment tier, with higher tiers available).
• Server-less: All VM management must be delegated to sub-service vendors.
• Service management simplicity: The number and types of architecture components (services, databases, sub-service vendors, etc.) should be minimized.

Identity Panel hosting achieves all of these goals through flexible Microsoft Azure and MongoDB Atlas based deployment.

The following illustrates data flow for the Identity Panel suite as hosted in SaaS.

The application suite is deployed using the following resource components:

Azure Front Door Service

Front Door is used as a layer 7 web application firewall. This is a global service that provides HTTP aware firewall services, as well as domain dependent application routing and static content compression.

Azure Private Link

Connections between the frontdoor, app service, key vault, and database are made over private networking using Azure Private Link. Even though Private Link is used, all connections are additionally encrypted using SSL with TLS 1.2 or 1.3.

Azure KeyVault

Application secrets, keys, and certificates are protected using an Azure KeyVault with premium SKU with HSM. Connections to the KeyVault are made over Azure Private Link using the app service's system managed identity.

Azure App Service

The Identity Panel web application is deployed as a .NET 8 application to Microsoft Azure Linux App Services. The application is configured to only accept inbound connections from Azure Frontdoor and from white-listed service-management IP addresses.

MongoDB Atlas

MongoDB is a document-based database. Instead of storing tables of rows and columns, it stores collections of binary JSON documents. MongoDB's design is particularly well suited to the data requirements of the Identity Panel Suite and enables superior performance.

Atlas is a fully managed database-as-a-service offering from MongoDB, including such features as performance monitoring, secure configuration, high availability and high performance clustering including sharding, full-text search indexing, and reliable region redundant backup services.