| Disclaimer: IFS Touch Apps are not bound to a specific version of IFS Applications and the technology and infrastructure might change during the lifespan of IFS Applications 9. The information provided in this section is correct at IFS Applications 9 Update1 RTM, but for more up to date information please contact your IFS representative. |
IFS Touch Apps Cloud is the name of the middle tier platform used to host business logic for IFS Touch Apps. The IFS Touch Apps Cloud is a multi-tenant and multi-version capable platform that hides much of the complexity of delivering a good Apps experiences to IFS Customers. The multi-tenant capability allows each customer to select which apps to run for each of their installations. The multi-version capability allows customers to have multiple versions of the IFS Touch Apps live concurrently, facilitating phased rollouts of new versions of apps.
The IFS Touch Apps Cloud is implemented as a set of stateless WCF services and web sites running in Microsoft Azure.
Figure: IFS Touch Apps Cloud Architecture
The IFS Touch Apps Cloud Customer Portal is where customers select which apps to enable for their installations, configure applications (e.g. selecting which types of notifications to display in NotifyMe or if TripTracker should use project based reporting) and monitor application usage.
Customers log in to the IFS Touch Apps Cloud Customer Portal using their standard IFS Applications credentials. The connecting user must have been granted the system privilege ADMINISTRATOR in IFS Applications.
Devices communicate with the IFS Touch Apps Cloud using HTTPS to secure the communication channel. Data is not encrypted further between device and IFS Touch Apps Cloud, but passwords are encrypted using the Customer’s public key and are only decrypted once they reach the IFS Uplink. This prevents Man-in-the-middle attacks from harvesting passwords even if the HTTPS traffic from device to the IFS Touch Apps Cloud or from the IFS Touch Apps Cloud to the IFS Uplink has been compromised.
Application code that gets deployed to the IFS Touch Apps Cloud has gone through an extensive review process to ensure that the code is secure and adheres to IFS standards and guidelines. Focus areas of the review include intrusion prevention, stability and data privacy.
Applications are run in silos and one application cannot access data or functionality in another application.
Application data is never persisted in the IFS Touch Apps Cloud and is not available to IFS personnel in logs or otherwise.
The Customer selects which applications to enable for their installations. Only these applications will be active in the IFS Touch Apps Cloud for that particular installation. Users cannot access the system through IFS Touch Apps that have not been enabled for the system.
The IFS Touch Apps Cloud runs as a clustered WCF service in Windows Azure. The Microsoft SLA guarantees 99.9% availability for the IFS Touch Apps Cloud. Availability is calculated over a monthly cycle.