Microsoft announces Azure Firewall Premium, a next generation firewall for highly sensitive environments

Microsoft today announced the public preview of Azure Firewall Premium, a next generation firewall service for highly sensitive and regulated environments. In addition to the features that are available as part of Azure Firewall Standard, Azure Firewall Premium offers the following:

• TLS inspection – decrypts outbound traffic, processes the data, then encrypts the data and sends it to the destination.
• IDPS – A network intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS) allows you to monitor network activities for malicious activity, log information about this activity, report it, and optionally attempt to block it.
• URL filtering – extends Azure Firewall’s FQDN filtering capability to consider an entire URL. For example, www.contoso.com/a/c instead of www.contoso.com.
• Web categories – administrators can allow or deny user access to website categories such as gambling websites, social media websites, and others.

Azure Firewall Premium will be using Firewall Policy, a global resource that can be used to centrally manage your firewalls using Azure Firewall Manager.

Azure Firewall Standard features:

• Stateful firewall as a service
• Built-in high availability with unrestricted cloud scalability
• Centralized network and application-level connectivity policy
• Threat intelligence-based filtering
• Support for hybrid connectivity through deployment behind VPN and ExpressRoute Gateways

Source: Microsoft