Azure Firewall Premium Documentation

Azure Firewall Premium

Azure Firewall Premium is a next-generation cloud-native network security service that protects your virtual network resources by enforcing granular, policy-based network access and threat intelligence. It's designed to be deployed as a highly available and scalable cloud firewall.

Azure Firewall Premium provides advanced threat protection and centralizes your network security policies across your subscriptions and virtual networks. It offers capabilities that are not available in Azure Firewall Standard, catering to more demanding security requirements.

Key Features

TLS Inspection

Azure Firewall Premium supports TLS inspection, allowing you to decrypt and inspect outbound and inbound TLS/SSL traffic. This is crucial for identifying malicious content, such as malware and phishing attempts, hidden within encrypted communications. By inspecting this traffic, organizations can gain visibility into threats that would otherwise be masked by encryption.

Note: Implementing TLS inspection requires careful planning and consideration of privacy implications and certificate management.

Web Categories

This feature enables you to allow or deny user access to Microsoft's extensive list of web categories. This helps enforce organizational policies, protect users from accessing risky websites, and manage bandwidth by restricting access to non-essential categories. You can create policies to block categories like 'Gambling', 'Adult Content', or 'Social Networking' during work hours.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDPS)

Azure Firewall Premium includes a robust IDPS that helps protect your network from exploits and malicious activities. It uses threat intelligence feeds to identify and block known attack signatures and suspicious traffic patterns. IDPS capabilities enhance your security posture by proactively defending against a wide range of cyber threats.

Important: Ensure your IDPS signatures are kept up-to-date to effectively defend against the latest threats.

IP Intelligence

Leveraging Microsoft's threat intelligence, IP Intelligence allows Azure Firewall Premium to block traffic to and from known malicious IP addresses. This feature helps protect your environment from botnets, exploit attempts, and other common threats originating from compromised or malicious sources.

Architecture

Azure Firewall Premium is a fully stateful, cloud-native firewall as a service. It is deployed within a virtual network and can inspect traffic flowing to and from different network segments. Its architecture is designed for high availability and scalability, ensuring continuous protection for your Azure resources and hybrid environments.

Deployment

Deploying Azure Firewall Premium involves creating a firewall resource in a dedicated Azure subnet within your virtual network. Network Security Groups (NSGs) and User Defined Routes (UDRs) are used to direct traffic through the firewall. The premium tier requires specific considerations for features like TLS inspection and IDPS configuration.

                    
                        # Example Azure CLI command for creating a Firewall Policy (conceptual)
                        az network firewall policy create \
                          --name MyFirewallPolicyPremium \
                          --resource-group MyResourceGroup \
                          --location eastus \
                          --threat-intelligence-mode 'Deny' \
                          --sku 'Premium'
                    
                

Management

Azure Firewall Premium is managed through Azure Policy, allowing for centralized configuration and management of network security rules, IDPS policies, TLS inspection profiles, and web category filtering. This unified management approach simplifies policy enforcement and auditing across your organization.

Use Cases

Protecting sensitive applications with advanced threat intelligence.
Enforcing granular access control to websites and cloud services.
Securing communication for highly regulated industries.
Centralizing security management for hybrid cloud environments.
Detecting and preventing advanced threats within encrypted traffic.

Limitations & Considerations

Azure Firewall Premium incurs higher costs compared to the Standard tier due to its advanced features.
TLS inspection can increase latency and requires robust certificate management.
IDPS rules require ongoing tuning to minimize false positives and ensure effective threat detection.
Consider the performance impact of enabling all advanced features simultaneously.