New Azure Bastion offers secure RDP and SSH access to your virtual machines

Microsoft yesterday announced the preview of Azure Bastion, a new fully managed PaaS service that offers secure RDP and SSH access to  virtual machines directly through the Azure Portal. Azure Bastion is provisioned directly in your Virtual Network (VNet) and supports all VMs in your Virtual Network (VNet) using SSL.

Exposing virtual machines directly to the public Internet to enable connectivity increases the security risk. With Azure Bastion, you can make the bastion host as primary exposed public access to lockdown of public Internet exposure and it also reduces threats such as port scanning and other types of malware targeting your VMs.

Key features:

• RDP and SSH from the Azure portal: Initiate RDP and SSH sessions directly in the Azure portal with a single-click seamless experience.
• Remote session over SSL and firewall traversal for RDP/SSH: HTML5 based web clients are automatically streamed to your local device providing the RDP/SSH session over SSL on port 443. This allows easy and securely traversal of corporate firewalls.
• No public IP required on Azure Virtual Machines: Azure Bastion opens the RDP/SSH connection to your Azure virtual machine using a private IP, limiting exposure of your infrastructure to the public Internet.
• Simplified secure rules management: Simple one-time configuration of Network Security Groups (NSGs) to allow RDP/SSH from only Azure Bastion.
• Increased protection against port scanning: The limited exposure of virtual machines to the public Internet will help protect against threats, such as external port scanning.
• Hardening in one place to protect against zero-day exploits: Azure Bastion is a managed service maintained by Microsoft. It’s continuously hardened by automatically patching and keeping up to date against known vulnerabilities.

You can learn more about Azure Bastion from the source link below.

Source: Microsoft