Pillars of a great architecture

The cloud has changed how business applications for organizations are designed and implemented. As a result, solution architectures can now be pulled together from one or more SaaS services that are working together to form a complete solution. In solving customer’s business problems, solution architects should be comfortable using the following services to build their overall solution:

• Dynamics 365
• Microsoft 365
• AppSource
• Extending with Microsoft Power Platform
• Microsoft Azure (used to fill in the remaining gaps)
• Microsoft Copilot

Design a great business application solution

While one single blueprint doesn’t exist for illustrating what a great business application solution architecture looks like, certain concepts apply, regardless of the unique customer challenges that you’re solving. While the following sections don’t provide a complete list, focusing on these concepts helps you build better overall solutions.

Security

Data is one of the most valuable assets of an organization, and ensuring proper use and access to this data is essential. In the security pillar, you’re focused on securing access to your architecture through authentication and protecting your application and data from network vulnerabilities. This process includes ensuring that you’re working with the appropriate teams to enable features like Azure Conditional Access and Data Loss Prevention policies. Additionally, you confirm appropriate use of your solution of secrets, certificates, and other techniques to ensure that access to data and services don’t fall into the wrong hands.

You must think about security throughout the entire life cycle of your application, from design and implementation to deployment and operations.

Customers entrust their data to your organization; you must ensure that only the right users have access. Beyond perimeter control through authentication, you must implement a security model that enforces access to the data that users are allowed to use. You must ensure that the security constructs that are established don’t place undue burden on your architects and prevent staff from doing their job, thus making the system unmaintainable.

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