Many Organizations have their web portals and applications which are hosted on- premise and there are many methods to give access to these applications on internet
One of the traditional methods is to have a Virtual Private Network configured, which will establish a secured connection between corporate network and internet users
Azure helps us to give access to in-house portals to internet with the help of Azure Application Proxy which avoids the need of using a separate virtual private Network configuration
For this demo, I am using Azure classic portal ( https://manage.windowsazure.com )
Components for Configuring Azure Application Proxy
- Azure Subscription
- Azure Application Proxy connector ( This can be downloaded from Azure Portal )
- An in-house portal which can be added to Azure
Azure Subscription :
you can get a free trial subscription from https://manage.windowsazure.com
If you have any existing Azure subscription ( either through EMS or O365, login to the Azure portal with Global Admin credentials )
Configuration of Azure Application Proxy
Navigate to Azure portal from https://manage.windowsazure.com
Navigate to Active Directory
Click on Dashboard and scroll down to the end, where you can see Application Proxy
Click on Configure
Scroll down to Application Proxy section
By default, Application proxy is disabled. Switch to enabled
Download the connector from the url
It is recommended to install the connector in Windows Server 2012 R2 Server which has access to Corporate Network as well as internet
The installation will prompt for the Azure Admin credentials
Run the Connector troubleshooter
You will be prompted with a command prompt on successful installation
Go back to the azure portal ( https://manage.windowsazure.com ) and come to the section of application proxy through the dashboard
Click on Manage Connectors if you install multiple connectors for redundancy
Adding in-house portal to Azure :
For this demo, I am using an in-house portal http://*****mysalary/, which can be accessed only through my corporate network
Url : http://*****mysalary/
Now, I will add this portal in Azure and configure it, to access from internet
Access Azure portal ( https://manage.windowsazure.com )
Navigate to Active Directory and click on Applications
Click on Add button which is at the bottom of the page and select the third option which is “publish an application that will be accessible from outside your network”
Give the details of the portal
Add the users to which you want to give access to this portal and navigate to Configure section as highlighted below
External url is the one which will allow you to access this portal through internet as you can see it has https in the url
To access this portal, Navigate to https://myapps.microsoft.com and sign in with Azure credentials
This will give you the list of applications and portals for which you were given access from Azure
In our scenario, payroll proxy is the App which will allow us to access my in-house portal through internet
I am able to login to the portal through internet and you can see the url with https://*****
Cross Check :
If you want to cross check whether proxy is configured correctly, you can access the app in mobile phone
Download “My Apps” application from Play store which will provide the list of applications under your login
List of apps available :
As you can see, I am able to access my payroll portal through https://*** in my mobile phone
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