I’ve been working on a project to move a customer’s IT infrastructure and application services to the cloud – in this case Microsoft Azure and Office 365.

Azure allows the creation of sophisticated virtual networks with multiple virtual networks, subnets, load balancers, network security groups (NSGs), VPN connections over the public Internet or using a dedicated MPLS link. It also operates with high levels of security (more details in the Microsoft Trust Center).

My customer is a public sector organization and had some specific security requirements that needed a greater level of monitoring of traffic between subnets than we could provide with Network Security Groups alone – essentially the ability to perform logging and to provide application-level awareness. The customer’s security team were keen that it should be possible to identify malicious activity and we confirmed that NSGs have minimal monitoring without any deep packet inspection.

So, in this case, we needed to turn to a network virtual appliance (NVA) solution. The Azure Marketplace has a variety of NVAs, including products from major player like Checkpoint, Cisco, Fortinet, F5 networks, Sophos, etc. The one we selected though (partly from technical requirements, and partly based on advice from Microsoft) was the Barracuda NextGeneration F-Series firewall.

I’m no network architect, but from my position in the world of Microsoft technology, just needing a network solution that could provide the flexibility, reliability and security that my customer needed, the Barracuda solution looks pretty outstanding. We’ve got an advanced firewall with Intrusion Detection System, VPN concentrator and proxy server – all in a single appliance running in Azure under a bring your own licence arrangement.

There’s a great video from Microsoft Channel 9 and Barracuda, talking about the NextGeneration F-Series firewalls, including some of the capabilities available if we put another device on-premises for VPN failback, etc. Well worth a look if you’re considering implementing an IaaS (or indeed PaaS) solution on Azure.