When most security and platform teams think about implementing zero trust, they tend to focus on the identity and access management layer and, in Kubernetes, on the service mesh. These are fine approaches, but they can cause challenges for constellations of legacy internal apps designed to run with zero exposure to outside connections. One solution to this problem is to leverage the load balancer as the primary implementation component for zero trust architectures covering legacy apps.
True Story: A Large Bank, Load Balancers and Legacy Code
This is a true story: A large bank has thousands of legacy web apps running on dedicated infrastructure. In the past, it could rely on a “hard perimeter defense” for protection with very brittle access control in front of the web app tier. That approach no longer works. Zero trust mandates that even internal applications maintain a stronger security posture. And for the legacy apps to remain useful, they must connect with newer apps and partner APIs. This means exposure to the public internet or broadly inside the data center via East-West traffic — something that these legacy apps were never designed for.
Still, facing government regulatory pressure to enhance security, the bank Continue reading
Prabhat Dixit