The problem
- An independent security assessment found critical weaknesses in sign-in, in how internal services were protected, and in how secrets were stored.
- Thousands of people depend on the portal, so the fixes could not interrupt them.
What we found
- User credentials lived in the portal's own database, and sign-in had no second factor.
- The supporting services for accounting and documents accepted requests without verifying the caller.
- Passwords and keys were partly hardcoded in code and configuration.
- Database changes were partly applied by hand, and nothing stopped a build for one environment from being deployed to another.
- No automated security scanning, and nothing inspecting inbound traffic before it reached the application.
What we did
Sign-in with a second factor
We replaced the portal's own sign-in with Microsoft Entra External ID, with a second step by email or text-message code. The portal no longer stores credentials. Most users kept their existing password, carried across on first sign-in.
Every service verifies every caller
The portal API and both supporting services validate a signed token on every request, apply the same role-based access rules, and reject unknown endpoints by default.
Secrets in a vault
All secrets moved into Azure Key Vault, each service reading only its own through a managed identity, with soft delete, purge protection and audit logging.
A firewall at the edge
All traffic now passes through Azure Front Door with a web application firewall, released in monitoring mode first and tuned against real traffic before blocking.
Safe, automated releases
Schema changes ship through the pipeline and a failed migration stops the release. Builds are pinned to their target environment. A production backup and restore test passed before go-live.
Scanning on every change
Static analysis, dependency scanning and secret scanning run on all three codebases before anything merges. Every initial alert was fixed or recorded with a written justification.
The result
- 2,137 customer accounts were created in Microsoft Entra on release night, with zero errors.
- 97% of people who tried signed in successfully on day one (321 of 331), with 1,932 successful sign-ins on the first day.
- Zero open code-scanning findings at closure, and zero passwords or keys left in source code.
- Members kept working through the change, and Strata has a documented set of fixes to show auditors, partners and customers.
“Briebug has delivered features on time and within budget, and we've seen end-user satisfaction through positive word-of-mouth reviews.”