Next-generation firewall capabilities with Azure Firewall Premium
This post was co-authored by Gopikrishna Kannan, Principal Program Manager, Azure Networking and Suren Jamiyanaa, Program Manager 2, Azure Networking.
Following the preview release announced in February 2021, we are announcing the general availability release of Microsoft Azure Firewall Premium.
Azure Firewall Premium provides advanced threat protection that meets the needs of highly sensitive and regulated environments, such as the payment and healthcare industries. Organizations can leverage Premium stock-keeping unit (SKU) features like IDPS and TLS inspection to prevent malware and viruses from spreading across networks in both lateral and horizontal directions. To meet the increased performance demands of IDPS and TLS inspection, Azure Firewall Premium utilizes a more powerful Virtual Machine SKU. Like Standard SKU, the Premium SKU can seamlessly scale up to 30 Gbps and integrates with availability zones to support the service level agreement (SLA) of 99.99 percent. The Premium SKU complies with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) environment needs.
To simplify migration for Standard SKU customers, we used a common configuration approach using Azure Firewall Policy. This approach allows reusing existing API integration with minimal changes and continues managing Azure Firewall using Firewall Manager. Customers using firewall rules (Classic) will take an additional step for the migration to Azure Firewall Policy first. Azure Firewall Policy offers several advantages such as sharing common configuration across multiple firewalls, grouping rules using rule collection groups, and managing rules over time using policy analytics (Private Preview). For more information, see the Azure Firewall Policy documentation page.
