Securing Azure Infrastructure with Hub-and-Spoke
In today's fast-paced and interconnected world, organizations rely heavily on cloud computing to manage their data, applications, and services. Among the various cloud service providers, Microsoft Azure has emerged as a popular choice due to its scalability, security, and flexibility. However, managing a large-scale Azure infrastructure can be complex and challenging, especially for small to medium-sized businesses.
Why The Hub-and-Spoke Model
To address the complexity, organizations are adopting the hub-and-spoke model, a configuration design that optimizes data traffic, resource allocation, and security in cloud-based environments. In the context of Azure, the hub-and-spoke model involves creating a central “hub” subscription that acts as a gateway to multiple “spokes” or peripheral subscriptions.
Centralized Governance
By centralizing key resources and services in the hub subscription, organizations can simplify governance and management tasks.
Resource Efficiency
The hub-and-spoke model enables organizations to allocate resources more efficiently, reducing waste and optimizing costs.
Scalability
The spoke subscriptions can be scaled independently of the hub subscription, allowing organizations to quickly adapt to changing business needs.
Enhanced Security
The central location of key services in the hub subscription provides an additional layer of security for sensitive data and applications.
Solution
This NDA-covered project transformed a client’s Azure infrastructure from public-facing to private, secure hub-and-spoke model. We designed a configuration where resources resided within a Spoke Subscription, connecting to a centralized Hub Subscription through dual DNS zones.
Hub Subscription
The hub subscription was configured as the central gateway for all spoke subscriptions, providing access to key services such as Azure Active Directory, Azure Storage, and Azure Virtual Machines.
Spoke Subscriptions
Each spoke subscription was designed to provide a specific business unit or department with its own dedicated resources, applications, and services.
Dual DNS Zones
The dual DNS zones ensured that the hub and spoke subscriptions were accessible from both inside and outside the organization's network.
Value Delivered
By centralizing key resources while enabling independent business units to function autonomously, we ensured consistency and flexibility, making our client’s infrastructure secure, efficient, and scalable.
