The release of Microsoft Azure Gateway Load Balancer is great news for customers, empowering them to simply and easily add Cisco Secure Firewall capabilities to their Azure cloud infrastructure. By combining Azure Gateway Load Balancer with Cisco Secure Firewall, organizations can quickly scale their firewall presence across their Azure cloud environment, providing protection for infrastructure and applications exactly where and when they need it.

With applications and resources hyper-distributed across hybrid-multicloud environments, organizations require agile security to protect their environment at each control point. This integration empowers organizations to dynamically insert Cisco's security controls and threat defense capabilities in their Azure environment, removing the clunkiness of provisioning and deploying firewalls, as well as the need to rearchitect the network. Organizations can now enjoy highly available threat defense on the fly, protecting their infrastructure and applications from known and unknown threats.

Securing cloud infrastructure while reducing complexity

Combining Secure Firewall with Azure Gateway Load Balancer offers a significant reduction in operational complexity when securing cloud infrastructure. Azure Gateway Load Balancer provides bump-in-the-wire functionality ensuring Internet traffic to and from an Azure VM, such as an application server, is inspected by Secure Firewallwithoutrequiring any routing changes. It also offers a single entry and exit point at the firewall and allows organizations to maintain visibility of the source IP address. Complementing these features, organizations can take advantage of our new Cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center. It enables organizations to manage their firewall presence 100% through the cloud with the same look and feel as they've grown accustomed to with Firewall Management Center. With Cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center, organizations will achieve faster time-to-value with simplified firewall deployment and management.

Benefits of Cisco Secure Firewall with Azure Gateway Load Balancer

• Secure Firewall lowers cloud spend with Azure Autoscale support-Quickly and seamlessly scale virtual firewall instances up and down to meet demand.
• De-risk projects by removing the need to re-architect-Effortlessly insert Cisco Secure Firewall in existing network architecture without changes, providing win/win outcomes across NetOps, SecOps, DevOps, and application teams.
• Firewalling where and when you need it-Easily deploy and remove Secure Firewall and its associated security services, including IPS, application visibility and control, malware defense, and URL filtering as needed in the network path.
• Greater visibility for your applications-Simplify enablement of your intended infrastructure by eliminating the need for source and destination NAT. No additional configuration needed.
• Health monitoring-Ensure efficient routing with continuous health-checks that monitor your virtual firewall instances via Gateway Load Balancer.
• Included Cisco Talos^?Threat Intelligence-Protect your organization from new and emerging threats with rapid and actionable threat intelligence updated hourly from one of the world's largest commercial threat intelligence teams, Cisco Talos.

Use-cases

Inbound

Figure 1: Inbound traffic flow to Cisco Secure Firewall with Azure Gateway Load Balancer

 

Figure 2: Inbound traffic flow to a stand-alone server

Outbound

Figure 3: Internal server is behind a public load balancer. Flow is the same as outbound flow for an inbound connection.

 

Figure 4: Outbound flow where the internal server is a stand-alone server.

Azure Gateway Load Balancer support for Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual is available now. To learn more about how Cisco Secure Firewall drives security resilience across your hybrid-multicloud environment, see the additional resources below and reach out to your Cisco sales representative.

Additional Resources

Microsoft Blog: Gateway Load Balancer now generally available in all regions

Azure Marketplace listing: Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual

Cisco Secure Firewall

Cisco Secure Firewall At-a-Glance

Cisco Secure Firewall for Public Cloud

Cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center

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