Pillars of a great architecture

Cloud technology has transformed the way organizations design and implement business applications. As a result, solution architectures can now be composed of multiple SaaS services working together to create a comprehensive solution. To effectively address customer business challenges, Solution Architects should be proficient in utilizing the following services to build their solutions:

Security:

• Most valuable asset is DATA , ensure proper accesss to protect the data from vulnerabilities.
• Leverage Azure Conditional access and Data loss Prevention policies. (Refer here for more details)
• Plays an important role throughout the life cycle of the project (Design , implementation, deployment and operation)

Empowering end users:

• Innovate and build the productive extension .
• Making use of reusable Power apps components to improve daily productivity.
• Using Microsoft-provider starter kit , templates, starter apps helps in user empowerment.

Trust and privacy:

Solution architects should be familar with Microsoft trust center which helps to assess the capabilities for the Microsoft products they use in the solution.

Maintainability of the overall solution:

When a custom solution is developed, Solution architect should update the process don`t break when the new updates are applied.

With proper documentation and comments , maintenance would be easier and less expensive.

Availability and recoverability:

Any solution would have the chance to fail and might not recover. When the Solution architect designs the solution, anticipating the failure and planning for the recovery should be covered. In case of integration among various systems, monitoring tools should be recommended , thus the entire solution doesn`t fail due to the failure of one component.

Performance and scalability:

Cloud architecture has the ability to scale dynamically based on the resouce capacity. The solution architect should identify the capacity of the component and its response time during high demand.

Below diagram is referred from Microsoft Learn which depicts the properly match resource capacity to demand.

Efficiency and operations:

Solution architect should design a robust monitorng framework to detect failures before escalated to the customers. The solution should be cost effective to operate and develop also covering the quality and efficient speed.

Shared responsibility:

Advantage of using cloud model over on-premises is shared responsibility. This will have implications on cost, operational capabilities, security and technical capabilities of the application. By shifting these responsibilites to the cloud,the focus can be shifted to business development.

Note.....

While designing the solution, the solution architect should the understand the trade-offs which are acceptable and which are not. The cost should cover everything from developing, time to deliver , operational agility , security and thus these pillars play a major role in design choices. But at the end, the solution should be built to be secure, scalable , available and recoverable.