Distributed Architectures: Deploying Unified yet Multi-Site PAM
Introduction
As organizations adapt to the ever changing IT environment, one important goal they seek to achieve among the way is to ensure continuous business activity with centralized governance and policy architecture.
Speaking about the former, organizations working out of multiple locations often deploy applications pertinent to their business requirements across multiple sites which is quite common, unlike the legacy architecture of a DR or primary instance. Now when the applications deployed across any of the multiple sites is faced with an outage or downtime, how does an organization ensure that users accessing their infrastructure across multiple sites access the entitled resource without any hinderance at all times?
Organizations seeking to manage policy and governance from a centralized architecture, ensuring continual business and facilitating secure operations, require solutions that must be highly available and scalable when adapting to the evolving IT Infrastructure. These features are inherent in a capability facilitated by Sectona Security Platform, Distributed Architectures, whose key goal is to provide user access to the organizations infrastructure across multiple sites without any disturbance.
Speaking about the former, organizations working out of multiple locations often deploy applications pertinent to their business requirements across multiple sites which is quite common, unlike the legacy architecture of a DR or primary instance. Now when the applications deployed across any of the multiple sites is faced with an outage or downtime, how does an organization ensure that users accessing their infrastructure across multiple sites access the entitled resource without any hinderance at all times?
Organizations seeking to manage policy and governance from a centralized architecture, ensuring continual business and facilitating secure operations, require solutions that must be highly available and scalable when adapting to the evolving IT Infrastructure. These features are inherent in a capability facilitated by Sectona Security Platform, Distributed Architectures, whose key goal is to provide user access to the organizations infrastructure across multiple sites without any disturbance.
Use Cases: Managing Multiple active sites
Sectona allows the nodes created at diverse locations to operate independently when the central node fails. Assume ABC has implemented Sectona distributed architectures at three locations: India, Qatar, and Uganda. India has a server with Central Node, and the other countries are synced with it. Due to a power cut at the location, the central node becomes inactive for the time being. Qatar and Uganda servers will take individual ownership of the architecture and operate independently in such a situation.
Deploying b/w public cloud and on-prem environment
Along with the on-prem setup, Sectona provides the privilege of deploying the public cloud environment such as Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. The public cloud is synced with the central node at regular intervals. In case of Central Node failure, Sectona allows the Cloud site to operate independently. Assume ABC has implemented Sectona distributed architectures at two locations: India and Qatar. They have Azure Cloud implemented in their environment. India has a server with Central Node, and the Qatar server along with Azure Cloud are synced with it. Due to a power cut at the location, the central node becomes inactive for the time being. Qatar and Azure Cloud servers will take individual ownership of the architecture and operate independently in such a situation.
How Sectona can be deployed at multiple sites:
When deploying Sectona PAM distributed architecture solution provides simple steps managed via the application interface to operate components such as gateways, proxies, and vaults. Sectona provides the fluency to either de-couple or completely replicate an instance. Now, how to decide whether to select de-coupling or replication. A simple solution to this is to check the system requirements. If the system is not entirely robust and you need to provide only specific accesses to your users, then the best solution is de-coupling. In contrast, replication is better if the system needs to be updated and entirely synced to all the nodes created.In any case, it is essential to build a more substantial infrastructure for your master nodes.
Once the central instance is created, you can now proceed with the two options:
Once the central instance is created, you can now proceed with the two options:
- De-coupling software resources: Sectona provides the privilege to add one primary node and up to 1+n fallback nodes for application. For vault, you can add one master and up to 1+n slaves. It is highly recommended to keep the applications in the system to perform their tasks independently. It allows components to remain completely autonomous and unaware of each other. A change in one service shouldn’t require a modification in the other services. It is the process of separating services so that their functionality is self-contained. For example, it is notably noticeable among teams in charge of shared infrastructure services like monitoring and logging. Logging should be able to evolve independently of application changes, according to the logging team.
- Creating replicas: Replicating across nodes can prevent data loss when using the embedded vault option. All configuration files are automatically synced from the primary node to the secondary node at a one-minute interval in a high availability arrangement. Physical database replication allows for rapid database synchronization. On the secondary node, the database is in read-replica mode. The High Availability service in the system manages the synchronization among the replicas.
Benefits:
A distributed network architecture is a technology that provides many benefits to your company. A distributed network architecture addresses three fundamental elements of systems with vast networks. Distributed network architecture maintains a single central control system, but the load can be divided among multiple local sites. These sites may be physically distant, but they are linked by the internet. And, even if one system fails, the others can continue to function normally. As the network grows, there is always the risk of an overload with single servers. If a single server goes down, the entire network goes down with it. The load is spread among the numerous systems in a distributed system, making networking faster and more efficient. Because the configuration is dispersed among the secondary servers, there is no loss of configuration if the central server fails. The central system, on the other hand, has the advantage of being able to monitor all operations, make security adjustments, and observe how the other locations are doing. Changes and updates done on the central server can be automatically merged with the entire dispersed network.
- Easy administration and operation via single application interface: The central network administrator can exercise as much or as little control as desired at any one time. This administrator can focus on other tasks by delegating responsibilities to local administrators.
- Scalability by de-coupling: Scalability is much easier with a dispersed network architecture than with a single network. Because the load is dispersed, new devices can be added to the network and set up without causing significant network disturbance.
Customer Story
An Insurance customer was looking for a lightweight and scalable solution as the Sectona’s Security Platform didn’t have too many resources at each of the sites and with Distributed Architectures requiring a minimal setup that ensures all the servers are in real time sync operating on micro services, yet providing centralized management of PAM policies, auditing and reporting in compliance with the compliance regulations.
With distributed architecture all the instances of PAM are in Active-Active mode, providing flexibility where a user in one region can connect and authenticate to a nearest PAM server and obtain authorized access to take their respective sessions on target servers and devices.
With distributed architecture all the instances of PAM are in Active-Active mode, providing flexibility where a user in one region can connect and authenticate to a nearest PAM server and obtain authorized access to take their respective sessions on target servers and devices.