Forced Tunneling in Azure

I am not an expert on networking, but sometimes while working in Azure, I have to face some different configurations in order to fulfill customer requirements.

In this case, my customer wanted to redirect all the Internet traffic on the VMs from Azure to OnPrem. Because If you don’t configure forced tunneling, Internet-bound traffic from your VMs in Azure always traverses from the Azure network infrastructure directly out to the Internet, without the option to allow you to inspect or audit the traffic. 

And you know… nowadays, unauthorized Internet access can potentially lead to security breaches…

So, to do that I was thinking in the way I used to do those kind of things, create a table route, redirect the 0.0.0.0/0 traffic to a NVA and done, but this case was not the same, because i needed to redirect all the traffic.

So in this case what is needed is the Forced Tunneling:

With that configuration any connectio from midtier and backed it is redirected back to onpremises via VPN S2S, and then the traffic can be inspected or event restricted.

The magic to achieve that scenario is to use PowerShell, there is no option to do that with the UI, you can check the full procedure in the following link: Configure forced tunneling for Site-to-Site connections – Azure VPN Gateway | Microsoft Docs

But make special attention to the following parameter:

$LocalGateway = Get-AzLocalNetworkGateway -Name "DefaultSiteHQ" -ResourceGroupName "ForcedTunneling"
$VirtualGateway = Get-AzVirtualNetworkGateway -Name "Gateway1" -ResourceGroupName "ForcedTunneling"
Set-AzVirtualNetworkGatewayDefaultSite -GatewayDefaultSite $LocalGateway -VirtualNetworkGateway $VirtualGateway

With that you create the magic in networking, the other steps that are done in the article are more or less the same that I usually did in my implementations.

So take into account that and happy routing!

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