design

introduction

The design of the LIC is a three layer architecture: presentation, domain (or business) logic and data access. The data access layer interfaces with many enterprise applications, such as mainframe quoting and final print services.

This infrastructure is cheap to build and cheap to maintain.

operational principles

A set of LIC operational principles describes the fundamental nature of the production service. Service levels are defined based on these principles. The production environment and LIC applications are measured to track compliance to these principles.

environments

Several LIC environments are used by the development lifecycle. These environments are used for development, testing and the production customer service. The test phase contains many test sub-phases and so several environments are used for different types of testing, in addition to the development and production environments.

A new infrastructure will be provided for sites capturing business logic of medium complexity. Very complex sites will be hosted in the java environments.

documents

A development lifecycle generates many supporting documents.

Documents include:

• SLA (Service Level Agreement)
• OLA (Operating Level Agreement)
• commercial support contracts
• operational support documentation
• system operational limits document

security

1. Test sites can only be accessed by known source IPs. This is because of the confidentiality of the test site content and the requirement to use a firewall.
2. Information in a test web site would be covered by some kind of non-disclosure agreement, so the "Classification of Information" is either Confidential or Internal.
3. "confidentiality" of a test web site is protected by confidential or secret Access Control. This includes labelling each page of a web site.
4. confidential test web site access must be by HTTPS.
5. Web site contents must be backed up.
6. The LIC owner tests the backup/restore.
7. The infrastructure and each new application gets beaten with the security stick to find vulnerabilities.
8. Static public web server content is controlled by the business customer, not by the LIC owner. It can't be integrity checked by the LIC owner or subject to change control. The LIC owner has more control over dynamic content and application code.
9. The business customer is responsible making sure their software does not compromise system security eg., checking program source code, removing vulnerabilities and back doors.
10. Business customers using our test sites must audit their networks regularly. Crikey, tough.
11. Application deployment and updates are subject to the LIC owner’s change management procedures.