Azure application proxy and discovery

[Narrator] Azure Application and App Discovery are also part of the Azure Active Directory offering. I'm going to take a few moments just to provide a very quick overview of these two services. We'll first look at the Azure Application Proxy. The Azure Application Proxy allows us to keep our applications on-premise, and then our remote users, or users outside of our on-premise environment, can securely connect to those applications without us punching holes into our firewall.

This can be accomplished because we are leveraging Azure Active Directory for the authentication. Let's actually take a look at it. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. So let's take a look at how this works. You'll notice that we have our application proxy, which is sitting in Azure Active Directory. In this example we have two connectors for redundancy that are installed on our corporate network. These connectors present our applications to the application proxy. Our users, whether or not they are using Android, Apple or Windows, are also able to access those applications via the proxy.

When an outside user needs access to one of the internal applications, the request is sent to the application proxy which is then directed to the connector and finally to the application. The traffic is then passed back up through the connector, through the application proxy back to the user. This is a great option for those cases where you need to keep your applications on-premise. And next, we have the Azure Active Directory Cloud App Discovery. We can use this tool to find cloud apps, identify users who are using cloud apps, and then configure these apps for secure access.

This does require the premium Azure Active Directory account. So how does it work? Well, the first thing you're going to do is install an agent on the devices. This agent will track all the cloud applications that that user uses. That data is then collected in Azure Active Directory and now you have the opportunity to go in and manage those cloud apps. For example, if we have a user who is using box.com, we may want to bring that application in-house and provide the corporate credentials for box.com instead of having the user access box.com and they could be putting up corporate documents into that box.com account.

That's one way you can use the Azure Cloud App Discovery tool. For more information on the Cloud App Discovery tool please see the Azure web site.