Summary
Your financial organization needed to continue running its credit-checking web service on-premises for regulatory compliance, even though it has already migrated many systems into the cloud. You wanted to find a way to call this web service securely from cloud components. But, you wanted to avoid the complexity of setting up and maintaining a virtual private network, or opening extra ports on your on-premises firewall. By using an Azure Relay namespace, you provided a destination in Azure, where cloud components can call the service. The namespace forwards requests to the on-premises web service and returns responses.
You could use a virtual private network or Azure ExpressRoute to create secure connections between cloud-hosted components and on-premises systems. However, these methods impose an extra layer of complexity and more administrative load on your team. Azure Relay is an excellent alternative for connecting your applications.
Learn more
To learn more about Azure Relay, see the following articles: