From the course: Microsoft Security Essentials: Concepts, Solutions, and AI-Powered Protection

Azure Firewall - Microsoft Security Copilot Tutorial

From the course: Microsoft Security Essentials: Concepts, Solutions, and AI-Powered Protection

Azure Firewall

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- [Instructor] Azure Firewall is a managed cloud-based network security service provided by Microsoft Azure. Firewalls are classic security controls. They're widely used to separate external networks from internal networks in on-premises environments. Firewalls monitor and filter inbound and outbound network traffic based on predefined security policies or rules. However, as organizations migrate their workloads to the cloud, traditional firewalls face challenges in meeting the demands of hybrid environments, spanning both on-premises and a cloud infrastructure. This is where Azure Firewall comes into play. You have workloads running Azure Virtual Networks. They need to communicate with the resources on the internet and within your on-premises environment. Azure Firewall access a centralized network security control to filter the traffic among all entities. It also provides additional capabilities, such as monitoring both network and application network traffic, including protocols like HTTPS, building high availability to ensure continuous operations, tracking states of active connections to make decisions based on traffic context, supporting source and destination Network Address Translation, or NAT, to manage and secure traffic between the internet and your private resources, and integration with many other Azure services, like Azure Virtual Networks, Azure Policy, and Azure Monitor. Moreover, Azure Firewall is integrated with Microsoft Security Copilot, an AI-powered assistant for security analysts. By enabling the Azure Firewall plugin, you can use prompts to access its capabilities in Microsoft Security Copilot, such as searching across firewalls for intrusion detection and prevention signatures, or asking Copilot to generate recommendations to secure your environment using Azure Firewall. When speaking of network security services in Azure, you may wonder, "What's the difference between an Azure Firewall and an Azure Network Security Group or NSG?" It seems both of them can filter network traffic. The key differences are Azure Firewall is a centralized service to provide a protection across variance subscriptions and virtual networks. Network Security Groups work within virtual networks in each subscription. Azure Firewall can work with both network and application-level traffic. Network Security Groups filter network-layer traffic. You can combine Azure Firewalls and Network Security Groups in your cloud security architecture to implement a defense-in-depth strategy.

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