Understand Hybrid Network Security with an Interactive Reference Architecture Diagram

Understand Hybrid Network Security with an Interactive Reference Architecture Diagram

Microsoft Azure has a public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering called Azure Infrastructure Services. It allows you to create virtual machines on the Azure network in a way that’s similar to how you create virtual machines on your on-premises network. But what if you want to connect your on-premises network to virtual machines on your Azure network? To do that, you need to create what they call a “hybrid network”. After you create a hybrid network setup, you have either a hybrid cloud (if you have a private cloud), or if you just have a server virtualization on-premises, then you have hybrid IT. Doesn’t really matter what you call it – let’s just call it hybrid networking.

What does a hybrid network look like? And more importantly, what does a secure hybrid network look like? Lots of people have a hard time figuring out the answer to that question. To help you with that, Microsoft has put together what they call the Extending Your Datacenter into Azure Interactive Reference Architecture diagram. This diagram provides you a multi-layered view of what such a hybrid network would look like, and includes many of the security elements you might be interested in. The diagram is also interactive, so when you hover over the graphics, you get a lot of information about each component.

The diagram collection includes:

The interactive diagram itself
A Visio file that includes not only the diagram, but some other information about networking, name resolution and authentication pieces of the infrastructure
An Excel spreadsheet that provides all the details of each of the infrastructure components seen in the diagram
A video that explains how to use the diagram and how to get the most out of it