For initial infrastructure setup, cloud engineers must select and configure the virtual firewall appliance and define compatible instance types across cloud regions, ensuring redundancy and resilience. Additional steps include setting up interfaces, assigning CIDR blocks, and managing keys, licenses, and certificates to connect with the management dashboard—each step varying across AWS, Azure, and GCP due to platform-specific nuances.

The discovery and network setup phase involves identifying VPCs and VNETs, mapping the network topology, and setting up security groups, route tables, and ACLs across regions. It also requires configuring load balancers (e.g., GWLB or Network LB) for high availability and symmetrical routing, along with autoscaling configurations.

The firewall must be strategically inserted into network paths to control app-to-app traffic by defining policies that segment and secure east-west (workload-to-workload) and north-south (ingress and egress) flows. Policies are tailored to meet specific security needs across cloud providers

Auto-scale and lifecycle management introduces additional complexity. To prevent performance degradation, autoscaling must be configured to adjust resources dynamically in response to traffic fluctuations, allowing the infrastructure to meet demand without manual oversight. This requires configuring cloud-native lifecycle policies to optimize the health and availability of firewall instances, with checks to automate instance restarts and scaling actions. Each provider’s scaling tools need custom configuration to ensure the firewall remains efficient under changing traffic conditions.

Finally, monitoring and troubleshooting involves setting up continuous monitoring for traffic flows and firewall performance across multi-cloud environments. Alerting systems must be configured to detect anomalies and send alerts, typically integrating multiple monitoring and analytics tools to gather telemetry data across all network hops. When issues arise, teams must trace packet flows and diagnose network path issues manually, often resulting in extended troubleshooting times. Each cloud provider’s tools and third-party solutions require integration, increasing the complexity of managing these environments efficiently.