To help customers address the diverse cloud and virtualization use cases and the growing need for greater performance, the VM-Series has been optimized and expanded to deliver industry-leading performance of up to 16Gbps of App-ID enabled firewall throughput across five models. Customers can protect their cloud and virtualization initiatives with a security feature set that mirrors those protecting their physical networks and delivers a consistent security posture from the network to the cloud.

Although IaaS providers are responsible for ensuring the security and availability of their infrastructure, ultimately, organizations are still responsible for the security of the applications and data. This reference architecture describes how your organization can use the Palo Alto Networks® VM-Series firewalls to bring visibility, control, and protection to your applications built in Microsoft Azure. This document provides architectural guidance for solution architects and engineers who are familiar with the next-generation firewall but not Azure. It links the technical aspects of the Azure and Palo Alto Networks solution together before exploring the technical design models of the architecture. Use this guide as a roadmap for architectural discussions between Palo Alto Networks and your organization.