Setting up Radware DefensePro with Cloud Armor integration for GCP

Australian organisations running regulated workloads on Google Cloud need more than a single layer of protection. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority's CPS 234 demands that banks, insurers and superannuation funds keep their information assets resilient against attacks, while the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme under the Privacy Act 1988 forces a quick, public response when customer data is exposed. Pairing Radware DefensePro's behavioural DDoS mitigation with Google Cloud Armor's edge WAF and Adaptive Protection gives engineering teams in Sydney and Melbourne a defence-in-depth model that satisfies both perimeter filtering and deeper behavioural inspection.

This walkthrough covers the architecture decisions, the configuration steps inside the GCP console, and the operational tasks that follow. It assumes a working knowledge of VPC networking, external HTTPS load balancers and basic Terraform, and it favours the patterns that match the realities of the australia-southeast1 and australia-southeast2 regions where latency to Telstra, Optus and NBN business customers matters most.

Plan the deployment around Australian compliance and connectivity

Before touching a console, map the regulatory frame onto the architecture. Workloads handling personal information fall under the Privacy Act and may need an IRAP-aligned assessment before they touch federal systems, while financial services entities must document their DDoS response inside a CPS 234 control matrix. Reference the ACSC Essential Eight as a baseline; Cloud Armor's managed protection rules map neatly onto application control and patching, while DefensePro covers the network-layer controls that Essential Eight does not reach directly.

Choose a home region deliberately. Most Australian tenants anchor on australia-southeast1 (Sydney) or australia-southeast2 (Melbourne) for proximity to east-coast end users, but mining and government workloads in Western Australia benefit from the newer australia-west1 region once it is enabled for the project. Confirm that DefensePro is listed in the GCP Marketplace for the chosen region, since some Bring-Your-Own-License images are gated. Reserve a separate management VPC so the Radware management interface never shares a routing domain with the production data path.

Configure Google Cloud Armor at the perimeter

Start by creating a Cloud Armor security policy and attaching it to the global external Application Load Balancer that fronts the application. Use preview mode during the first week of any new rule so a misplaced SQLi signature cannot knock a Brisbane call centre offline at 3 am AEST. Adaptive Protection, which relies on machine learning over the past few minutes of traffic, should be enabled at the policy level and configured to notify an on-call channel rather than block outright during the rollout.

Layer in preconfigured WAF rules for OWASP signatures, then add geo-based restrictions only where the business case is clear. Australian retailers usually allow traffic from AEST timezones and block high-risk origins, while government tenants lean on IP allow-lists of agency ranges plus ASD's Known Good list. Push rule versions through Cloud Source Repositories so the change history mirrors the same Git workflow used for the rest of the infrastructure, and tie each deploy to a pull request that an Australian-based reviewer must approve during business hours.

Deploy Radware DefensePro inside the VPC

Launch DefensePro from the Marketplace, selecting the BYOL image if the licence already covers Australian PoPs, or the PAYG SKU for short-term projects. Size the instance against expected peak throughput; a single DefensePro VM on n2-standard-16 typically saturates a 10 Gbps NIC, which suits a mid-sized SaaS platform, whereas telco-grade workloads need a clustered pair with stateful failover. Place the data NIC in a dedicated tier of the VPC with a /28 subnet large enough to host the floating IP, and keep the management NIC on a private Cloud Interconnect or a tightly scoped VPN reachable only from the corporate network in Sydney.

Once the instance boots, configure the Behavioral Protection engine and import the latest Radware signature pack. AEST is UTC+10 and AEDT is UTC+11, so schedule signature refreshes outside the Sydney trading window when financial workloads are most sensitive to even minor inspection latency. Bind the DefensePro device to the same backend service group that Cloud Armor protects, but disable the LB health check on the protected port until integration is verified, otherwise transient connection failures during bootstrapping will be masked as healthy state.

Wire the two layers together

The integration pattern depends on whether DefensePro runs in-line or out-of-path. The common Australian pattern uses inline insertion: the HTTPS load balancer sends traffic to a Network Load Balancer internal to the VPC, which forwards to DefensePro, and DefensePro returns scrubbed traffic to an internal Application Load Balancer that finally reaches the workload. Use the in-built health checks at every hop so a DefensePro failover or a software patch automatically drains traffic via the GCP load balancer.

For hybrid designs where part of the estate remains in a Sydney or Perth colocation, terminate a Cloud VPN or Dedicated Interconnect at the VPC and run BGP so DefensePro sees real routes from on-prem. A GRE tunnel between the DefensePro appliance and a Cloud Router makes the inspection layer agnostic to the underlying carrier, which simplifies the handoff when traffic transits the Southern Cross or Hawaiki cable systems. Tag every forwarding rule with environment and cost-centre labels so finance teams in Australian-headquartered organisations can attribute scrubbed traffic cleanly.

Validate, observe and operate the stack

Run synthetic attacks from third-party load generators before exposing the stack to production. A small HTTP GET flood with a slow-loris component is enough to confirm that Cloud Armor's rate limiting fires first, DefensePro catches the residual volumetric burst, and the WAF still blocks a parallel SQLi probe. Pipe both Cloud Armor logs and Radware's syslog stream into Cloud Logging and forward to Chronicle or a Sydney-region SIEM so analysts see one timeline.

Keep runbooks current with ACSC advisories; the ACSC publishes DDoS guidance that should be reviewed whenever the threat level changes. Schedule maintenance windows in AEDT or AEST and publish them to the change advisory board at least five business days ahead, matching the standard cadence used by Australian enterprises. Rehearse the disclosure path required by the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme so the operations team knows who signs off on an OAIC statement if a scrubbed attack still extracts data.