Securing Azure Infrastructure with Hub-and-Spoke

Organizations rely heavily on cloud computing to manage their data, applications, and services in today's fast-paced and interconnected world. Microsoft Azure has become a popular choice among cloud service providers 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

Organizations are adopting the hub-and-spoke model, a configuration design that optimizes data traffic, resource allocation, and security in cloud-based environments to address the complexity. 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

Organizations can simplify governance and management tasks by centralizing key resources and services in the hub subscription.

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 a private, secure hub-and-spoke model. We designed a configuration in which 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.

Secure VM Access

We implemented Azure Bastion to provide secure, high-speed access to virtual machines without needing SSH keys or remote desktop connections.

Less Complexity

The client reduced management complexity and increased efficiency by centralizing key resources in the hub subscription.

Healthy Codebase

The team adapted the codebase to take advantage of Azure's scalability features, allowing them to scale up or down as needed quickly.