Security Patterns and Guidance

Security is the capability of a system to prevent malicious or accidental actions outside of the designed usage, and to prevent disclosure or loss of information. Cloud applications are exposed on the Internet outside trusted on-premises boundaries, are often open to the public, and may serve untrusted users. Applications must be designed and deployed in a way that protects them from malicious attacks, restricts access to only approved users, and protects sensitive data.

The following patterns are related to maximizing security in cloud-hosted applications.

Federated Identity Pattern

Delegate authentication to an external identity provider. This pattern can simplify development, minimize the requirement for user administration, and improve the user experience of the application.

For more info, see the Federated Identity Pattern.

Gatekeeper Pattern

Protect applications and services by using a dedicated host instance that acts as a broker between clients and the application or service, validates and sanitizes requests, and passes requests and data between them. This pattern can provide an additional layer of security, and limit the attack surface of the system.

For more info, see the Gatekeeper Pattern.

Valet Key Pattern

Use a token or key that provides clients with restricted direct access to a specific resource or service in order to offload data transfer operations from the application code. This pattern is particularly useful in applications that use cloud-hosted storage systems or queues, and can minimize cost and maximize scalability and performance.

For more info, see the Valet Key Pattern.

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