The Growth of Hybrid Cloud and the Need for a Solution
Cloud computing offers numerous potential benefits for an organization, and a growing percentage of organizations’ IT infrastructure is hosted in the cloud.
However, cloud environments are not an ideal fit for every use case, and many organizations maintain some of their IT infrastructure on-premises ,and may use more than one public or private cloud. As a result, the majority of companies have hybrid cloud environments, combining on-prem and cloud infrastructure. With infrastructure distributed over multiple locations, companies need networking solutions that can securely and efficiently link geographically-distributed solutions.
How Does Azure Virtual WAN Work?
Azure Virtual WAN uses software-defined networking to create a private, virtualized network within an organization’s cloud deployment. Data can be routed securely throughout an organization’s hybrid cloud, protected from potential eavesdropping.
Azure Virtual WAN also enables connectivity outside of the Azure cloud via SD-WAN or VPN connections. These enable an organization to connect its on-prem infrastructure, branch locations, and remote workers to the virtual network hosted within Azure.
Azure Virtual WAN Architecture
Azure Virtual WAN is designed as a hub-and-spoke architecture. Any Microsoft Azure region can act as the network hub, and Microsoft offers full-mesh connectivity between regions, enabling an organization to easily connect its Azure-based infrastructure. From a central hub, an organization can connect its hybrid cloud infrastructure via spokes. Geographically-distributed sites can be linked to Azure via SD-WAN or VPN.
What Are the Benefits of Azure Virtual WAN for Customers?
Azure Virtual WAN is primarily targeted at enterprises that maintain large, distributed, and heterogeneous IT environments. For these users, Azure Virtual WAN provides several benefits, including:
- Improved Protection: Enables an organization to implement a private network within its hybrid cloud environment. This helps to protect corporate network traffic from eavesdropping and to restrict access to internal corporate applications and systems.
- Easier Configuration: Makes it easy to define a private network within the Azure cloud. It also offers prebuilt configurations to link certain external environments (as spokes) to Azure Virtual WAN.
- Better Network Visibility: WIth Azure VWAN, all of an organization’s network traffic in its hybrid cloud environment flows through the Virtual WAN. This enables an organization to maintain network visibility and more easily address potential network performance and security issues.
- Simplified Operations: Offers the ability to integrate with other solutions within the Azure Marketplace. This enables an organization to easily add more features to its VWAN, such as the ability to deploy enterprise-grade cloud network security to monitor and protect its cloud network traffic.
Azure Virtual WAN Security
Azure Virtual WAN provides organizations with the ability to securely link their hybrid infrastructure together. VPN and SD-WAN provide private connections over public networks, preventing eavesdropping on corporate traffic.
However, VPN and SD-WAN solutions don’t inspect the traffic that they carry for potentially malicious content. As an organization links together its cloud infrastructure, on-prem data center, branch locations, and remote workers, the potential exists for an attacker who has compromised any of these to move laterally through an organization’s network to attack other components.
For this reason, a hybrid cloud infrastructure — such as the one made possible by Azure Virtual WAN — must also be protected by enterprise-grade network security. Ideally, network security solutions should be deployed on Microsoft Azure — in the hub of Azure Virtual WAN’s hub-and-spoke architecture — so that all network traffic can be inspected for potential threats en route to its destination in a centralized and consistent manner. Alternatively, virtual WAN deployments can be secured by using a distinct security solution for every spoke connection, but this is inefficient, inconsistent and may introduce additional risk.
Azure Virtual WAN Security with CloudGuard Network Security
Hybrid cloud environments are complex and heterogeneous, which can make them difficult to secure. Enterprise-grade network security is essential to achieving the visibility and threat prevention capabilities that these networks need.
To address the security needs of Azure Virtual WAN users, Microsoft and Check Point partnered to integrate Check Point’s CloudGuard Network Security with Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN. Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for Azure Virtual WAN delivers comprehensive security tailored to protect public and hybrid cloud environments, which enables businesses to secure their complex Azure Virtual WAN deployments, confidently extend their data center applications and workflows to the cloud, and connect to them securely.
For more information about Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for Azure Virtual WAN or to deploy it in your cloud environment, check it out in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. To see CloudGuard Network Security’s capabilities for yourself, sign up for a free demo today or schedule a personalized cloud security workshop.
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