Monolithic, multi-tiered approaches to design software has become a thing of the past in recent years. These approaches have given way to a more modular architecture, commonly referred to as “micro services.” Despite the name, some of these services aren’t actually micro at all. Isolating an app’s services into interoperable containers has revolutionized the way developers are able to update, add to, or expand parts of an app. While micro services have freed us from many of the constraints of the monolith, these benefits come with increased complexity, vulnerabilities, and risks that need to be mitigated with a tailored security strategy. It’s important to adhere to the same security standards while designing your MuleSoft integrations.

The Goal of Security Design Principles

No matter how the applications are integrated, security concerns typically reside within the network. For micro services, this gets exacerbated due to the various network connections and APIs used to forge communication channels between all those components. These create more loopholes for attach and interception of data that is in-transit. Therefore, it’s necessary to keep security design principals in mind while designing your integration using any framework, such as MuleSoft, Jitterbit or any other platform.

The goal of security design is based on:

Digitization of Business Capabilities
Multiple digital channels
Confidentiality
Integrity
Availability

The Security Design Principles

There are seven design principles that are crucial to keep in mind when designing integration within a framework. Without these design principles in place, your data could be put at risk. The principles include networks that are:

Standardized
- Choose the best technologies

How can I best secure my APIs?

Targeted
- API profiling and network segmentation

Minimized
- Be stingy with capabilities (these include domain-driven design, business entities, and a single responsibility principle)

Secure APIs in Mulesoft

Locked

Multi-keyed
- Use OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0
- Use TLS, Mutual TLS, SAML, and JWT

What is important about API security design

Elastic
- Use Containerization & Container Scheduling
  - Each Microservice has distinct scalability requirements
  - Container scheduling makes scaling easy
  - PaaS frameworks schedule containers based on traffic

API security design best practices

Resilient
- Queries with the Circuit Breaker Pattern
- Commands with Domain Events

The Four Pillars of an Integration Project

The four pillars of an integration project, which are the building blocks for a solid, secure application network, are:

Speed
Agility
API Security
Innovation

Complexity can create vulnerability, and data security is a difficult enough problem without trying to extract data to fit a legacy standalone. As you design application networks, following these application design best practices can help you: