Chapter 3: Core Architectural Concepts – Integration and Cryptography

In this chapter, we'll continue to discover the general architectural concepts that a Salesforce CTA should be familiar with. In today's world, we rarely come across a single implementation where Salesforce is completely isolated. In most cases, Salesforce will become the heart of the enterprise's business transformation process, which means that it has to be connected with dozens of other new and existing applications. Integration cost is sometimes overlooked or underestimated, despite the different studies that point out that around 25-35% of the total project cost would likely be spent on integration.

Coming up with the right integration architecture is crucial to the success of a Salesforce project. Moreover, securing the internal and external integration interfaces is becoming more and more important, especially with the progressive move toward API economy and data monetization. The...

Integration in the enterprise – understanding the landscape

The digital enterprise landscape is continuously becoming more sophisticated. Gone are the days when the enterprise used to have less than 10 systems covering most of its business processes. Today's enterprises have hundreds, if not thousands, of different applications that are either bought, built in house, or a combination of both. This is in addition to a set of legacy systems that are still surviving the axe. Nowadays, it is very common to find that an enterprise has dozens of websites, multiple instances of ERP systems, and many other departmental applications, in addition to several data warehouses or lakes.

One of the reasons why enterprises end in such situations is because of the complexity associated with building business applications. Building a single application that runs all business processes is nearly impossible. Maintaining it and adapting to day-to-day business challenges and requested changes...

Introducing the common integration styles

When designing an integration architecture between two or more systems, the key challenge is how to actually achieve that. There are some common integration styles that architects should be familiar with. You need to become familiar with them and understand how and when to use each of them. In today's world, some of these integration styles have evolved and are used as part of modern enterprise integration platforms. Let's take a closer look at each of them.

File transfer

In this integration style, applications produce a file containing the data that other applications would consume. This file is normally in a format that can be read by all the target systems and shared to a repository that can be accessed by all concerned systems. These systems are responsible for transforming the file into any other format they are expecting, while the file's producer is responsible for generating the data files on regular intervals based...

Discussing the different integration tools

Before we discuss some of the common types of integration tools available today, we need to explain why we need these tools. As a Salesforce Architect, you are expected to guide the client and the integration team when it comes to selecting the right set of tools that support the agreed integration strategy. And you should be able to challenge sub-optimal design decisions based on valid logic and rational. Picking the wrong tool or taking shortcuts without considering their potential impact could prove to be very costly, and this might impact the project/program in multiple ways and become a major risk to the success of your Salesforce implementation. During the CTA review board, you are always expected to justify why you selected your integration tools.

Historically, a common way to integrate two applications together is through a direct channel with no third-party app or mediator in-between. This can be done with what has become known...

Exploring the modern integration approaches

The technological landscape is ever changing, and as a Salesforce architect, you are dealing with modern tools and technologies every day. It is very important to align the knowledge we covered earlier with today's modern integration approaches. Some of these approaches are becoming less popular nowadays, but their concepts are still the basis of other more modern approaches. In order to fully understand the modern integration approaches and be able to lead discussions with your client, enterprise architects, and integration architects about the most appropriate integration strategy to use, you need to have a wide knowledge of today's modern integration approaches, in addition to a deep and solid understanding of their basis. In my experience, technology enthusiasts might get carried away with new concepts and terminologies. And, while staying up to date with the latest and greatest market trends is very important, it is your duty...

Cryptography – understanding the general concepts

Cryptography has a tight relationship with several other architectural domains, such as integration and identity and access management (IAM). It also has tight relationships with data, as we discovered earlier when we discussed both encryption at rest and on transit. As a Salesforce Architect, you need to have a general understanding of the value of cryptography, the different types of cryptography algorithms, and a high-level understanding on the way they work. This will help you understand the details of some of the day-to-day activities that take place in Salesforce implementation projects, such as securing an integration channel using TLS or two-way TLS (also known as mutual authentication), or how authentication tokens are digitally signed.

Encryption is the process of converting original readable data (also known as plaintext) into a form that can't be read by unauthorized parties (also known as ciphertext). Encryption...

Cryptographic algorithm types and use cases

The two types of cryptography algorithms that we will dive into are symmetric cryptography algorithms and asymmetric encryption algorithms. We will also dig into the details of hashing algorithms, digital signatures, and message authentication codes (MACs).

Symmetric cryptography algorithms

This is the family of algorithms that relies on a symmetric key for both encrypting the plaintext and decrypting ciphertext. As we discussed earlier, storing the key in a secure and safe way is absolutely crucial for this type of algorithm. The need for sharing the key between both parties (sender and recipient) is one of the main drawbacks of these types of algorithms as the attacker could intercept the used channel and get access to the key. There have been several workarounds during history (remember, some of these algorithms have been around for many years). More streamlined approaches have been adopted in the digital world, and we will find...

Summary

We have covered a lot of ground in this chapter. We started by looking at the general concepts surrounding integration before moving on and looking at some of the older and more modern integration approaches. We achieved this by looking at different types of tools and mechanisms. We also learned about some of the ideal use cases for each of these tools.

We then moved on to a closely-related architectural topic: security and cryptography. We learned some key concepts in the wide and complex world of cryptography and tied them back to some real-world examples that we come across every day.

Finally, we tied all this together and learned how integration and cryptography can work side by side in the enterprise landscape.

In the next chapter, we will cover another key architectural concept. Identity and access management (IAM) architectural concepts are now extensively used in modern distributed solutions. These IAM concepts are closely related to both the integration and...