Upgrade your network protection with Azure Firewall Premium

27th October 2021 Anthony Mashford 0 Comments

This blog has been co-authored by Suren Jamiyanaa, Program Manager II and Eliran Azulai, Principal Program Manager.

We continue to be amazed by the adoption, interest, positive feedback, and the breadth of use cases customers are finding for our service. Today, we are excited to share several new Azure Firewall Premium capabilities based on your feedback:

Azure Firewall Premium availability in more regions. In Azure, we make it our mission to be the world’s computer and as part of fulfilling this mission we are available in more regions and data centers than any other public cloud. The Azure Firewall team follows the same ethos by bringing Firewall Premium’s next generation threat protection and security closer to the applications and customers.
Terraform support for Firewall Policy Premium is now available. Terraform is a popular open-source tool used by DevOps for implementing infrastructure as code. Azure Firewall Premium supports a range of DevOps tools including Azure CLI, PowerShell, REST API. Customers can now use Terraform to manage their Azure Firewall Premium.
Web categories Category Check is now available in preview. Web categories lets administrators allow or deny user access to web site categories such as gambling websites, social media websites, and others. Often customers want to check what categories does a specific URL fall under. Customers can now use the convenience of Azure Portal to determine URL web categories and share feedback if the category is not accurate.
Migrate to Premium SKU using Stop/Start approach. Stop/Start is a convenient approach adopted by customers to stop firewall billing during evaluation period. This approach deallocates the firewall virtual instances while preserving the underlying firewall resource. Customers are looking for a simple migration to Azure Firewall Premium can now use the Stop/Start approach. This approach is supported for both Secure Hub and Hub VNET firewalls.

Azure Firewall Premium is now available in new regions

Azure Firewall Premium is now available in both Microsoft Government Cloud and Azure China 21Vianet. This expansion makes Azure Firewall Premium now available in 44 Azure regions.

USGov Texas
USGov Arizona
USGov Virginia
China North 2
China East 2

Terraform support for Firewall Policy Premium

Terraform community recently added support for Firewall Policy Premium SKU properties. Customers using Firewall Policy can now leverage Terraform to manage both Standard and Premium SKU attributes. See the Terraform API documentation for more information.

Web categories—Category Check and Mis-Categorization request

Web categories is a feature that allows you to filter application traffic based on defined categories, such as gambling, social media, and download sites. With Web Categories Category Check, administrators can now perform a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) or URL check to identify which category a website falls under. This is particularly useful when defining your rules. In addition, you can now provide feedback by submitting a Mis-Categorization request if you believe a website should fall under a different category.

Migrate to Premium SKU using Stop/Start approach

If you use Azure Firewall Standard SKU with Firewall Policy, you can use the Allocate/Deallocate method to upgrade your Firewall SKU to Premium. This migration approach is supported on both VNET Hub and Secure Hub Firewalls. Secure Hub deployments will be upgraded while preserving the public IP of the firewall. Read the documentation on how to migrate to Azure Firewall Premium.

Next Steps

For more information on everything we covered above, see the following documentation:

Source: Azure Blog Feed

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