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/cinstead ofwww.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