Microsoft Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-based network security service that protects your Azure Virtual Network resources. The company recently announced a preview release of a premium version of the cloud-based network security service.

Azure Firewall became generally available during Ignite in 2018 and received several updates later on, such as Threat Intelligence and Service Tags filters, Custom DNS, IP Groups, and now has an additional tier with premium. The release of the premium tier includes the following features according to the Azure documentation:

• TLS inspection - decrypts outbound traffic, processes the data, encrypts the data, and sends it to the destination.
• **IDPS **- a network intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS), which allows users 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, etc.

Eliran Azulai, Principal Program Manager, Azure Networking, told InfoQ:

When it comes to network security, the key is to use cloud-native services to secure the network infrastructure and application delivery. To minimize attack surface, customers need network segmentation, threat protection, and encryption.

Network segmentation helps prevent lateral movement and data exfiltration. Our customers can use Virtual Networks and Azure Firewall to perform network segmentation effectively When it comes to threat protection, the most basic protection they must turn on is DDoS protection on all public IPs. We have added our unique intelligent threat protection to Azure Firewall to stay ahead of the attacks. Customers can also use IDPS to identify, alert and block malicious traffic. Finally, customers can encrypt communication channels across the cloud and hybrid networks with industry leading encryption such as TLS.

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