Designing secure agent architectures for the enterprise era

Architecture principle

Design agents with explicit purpose, identity, permissions, retrieval boundaries, tool controls, policy decisions, and evidence capture.

Control implications

• Separate read-only retrieval from mutating actions
• Require policy decisions before sensitive execution
• Constrain credentials and secrets by workload identity

Architecture and implementation guidance

• Use AI gateways to centralize control, logging, evaluation, and routing.
• Use MCP or tool gateways with explicit permission models.
• Separate read-only knowledge retrieval from mutating actions.
• Require policy decisions before sensitive tool execution.

Design tradeoffs

• Shared agent platforms versus purpose-built agent boundaries
• Central gateways versus direct service integrations
• Developer flexibility versus reusable enterprise controls

Evidence to design for

• Agent execution traces
• Gateway decisions
• Tool and retrieval provenance
• Security evaluation results

Implementation artifacts

• Agent reference architecture
• MCP or tool-gateway design
• Authorization model
• Runtime evidence model

Continue from architecture thinking to action

Use the related service to understand engagement scope, the industry path to add operating context, and Evidence to inspect how IKEVAR turns architecture ideas into reviewable technical artifacts.