The disclosure provides an approach for managing and diagnosing middleboxes in a cloud computing system. In one embodiment, a network operations center, that is located remote to a virtualized cloud computing system and communicates with the cloud computing system via a wide area network, controls network middleboxes in the cloud computing system through a secure routing module inside a gateway of the cloud computing system. The secure routing module is configured to receive, from an authenticated management application and via a secure communication channel, packets intended for managing network middleboxes. In turn, the secure routing module establishes secure communication channels with the target middleboxes, translates the identified packets to protocols and/or application programming interfaces (APIs) of the target middleboxes, and transmits the translated packets to the target middleboxes.