Microsoft Azure: Understanding the Three Connectivity Options

It's rare to find an organization today that isn't adopting a cloud infrastructure for one or more of their applications. While some organizations prefer to build their cloud infrastructures themselves, leveraging a cloud provider who offers Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and assistance to help manage the move to a modern datacenter is also a common path to reach this goal.  One of the largest public cloud options, Microsoft Azure, is growing in popularity and is the basis of many infrastructure and cloud Dynamics offerings today.

Azure offers the ability to deploy applications as cloud workloads as well as migrate legacy systems via IaaS strategies.  The key component of making this strategy work is continuing to provide reliable private connectivity to these services once they've been migrated.  Azure allows for site-to-site VPNs, point-to-site VPNs, as well as the newly available express route connectivity option.  In this article, we outline the benefits and limitations of the three strategies Azure offers for private connectivity.

In last month's article, Setting up Microsoft Azure for Test and Development Environments, we mentioned Virtual Networks (VNets), overlays that are configurable with Azure that enable servers and services to communicate with one another.  It's safe to assume that if you're going to have more than one server within Azure, you are going to need a VNet.  You'll also need a VNet if you're planning on creating a cross-premises connection or hybrid solution, if you want to configure a DNS solution for your VMs, or if you want to use a persistent private IP address.  If you initially deploy your VNet as a cloud-only network you'll have to create a new VNet and recreate your VM's on it, so make sure that you plan accordingly.

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