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Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support. Azure Firewall Standard features
In this articleAzure Firewall Standard is a managed, cloud-based network security service that protects your Azure Virtual Network resources.
Azure Firewall includes the following features:
Built-in high availabilityHigh availability is built in, so no extra load balancers are required and there's nothing you need to configure. Availability ZonesAzure Firewall can be configured during deployment to span multiple Availability Zones for increased availability. With Availability Zones, your availability increases to 99.99% uptime. For more information, see the Azure Firewall Service Level Agreement (SLA). The 99.99% uptime SLA is offered when two or more Availability Zones are selected. You can also associate Azure Firewall to a specific zone just for proximity reasons, using the service standard 99.95% SLA. There's no additional cost for a firewall deployed in more than one Availability Zone. However, there are added costs for inbound and outbound data transfers associated with Availability Zones. For more information, see Bandwidth pricing details. Azure Firewall Availability Zones are available in regions that support Availability Zones. For more information, see Regions that support Availability Zones in Azure Note Availability Zones can only be configured during deployment. You can't configure an existing firewall to include Availability Zones. For more information about Availability Zones, see Regions and Availability Zones in Azure. Unrestricted cloud scalabilityAzure Firewall can scale out as much as you need to accommodate changing network traffic flows, so you don't need to budget for your peak traffic. Application FQDN filtering rulesYou can limit outbound HTTP/S traffic or Azure SQL traffic to a specified list of fully qualified domain names (FQDN) including wild cards. This feature doesn't require TLS termination. Network traffic filtering rulesYou can centrally create allow or deny network filtering rules by source and destination IP address, port, and protocol. Azure Firewall is fully stateful, so it can distinguish legitimate packets for different types of connections. Rules are enforced and logged across multiple subscriptions and virtual networks. Azure Firewall supports stateful filtering of Layer 3 and Layer 4 network protocols. Layer 3 IP protocols can be filtered by selecting Any protocol in the Network rule and select the wild-card * for the port. FQDN tags make it easy for you to allow well-known Azure service network traffic through your firewall. For example, say you want to allow Windows Update network traffic through your firewall. You create an application rule and include the Windows Update tag. Now network traffic from Windows Update can flow through your firewall. A service tag represents a group of IP address prefixes to help minimize complexity for security rule creation. You can't create your own service tag, nor specify which IP addresses are included within a tag. Microsoft manages the address prefixes encompassed by the service tag, and automatically updates the service tag as addresses change. Threat intelligenceThreat intelligence-based filtering can be enabled for your firewall to alert and deny traffic from/to known malicious IP addresses and domains. The IP addresses and domains are sourced from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence feed. DNS proxyWith DNS proxy enabled, Azure Firewall can process and forward DNS queries from a Virtual Network(s) to your desired DNS server. This functionality is crucial and required to have reliable FQDN filtering in network rules. You can enable DNS proxy in Azure Firewall and Firewall Policy settings. To learn more about DNS proxy, see Azure Firewall DNS settings. Custom DNSCustom DNS allows you to configure Azure Firewall to use your own DNS server, while ensuring the firewall outbound dependencies are still resolved with Azure DNS. You may configure a single DNS server or multiple servers in Azure Firewall and Firewall Policy DNS settings. Learn more about Custom DNS, see Azure Firewall DNS settings. Azure Firewall can also resolve names using Azure Private DNS. The virtual network where the Azure Firewall resides must be linked to the Azure Private Zone. To learn more, see Using Azure Firewall as DNS Forwarder with Private Link. FQDN in network rulesYou can use fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) in network rules based on DNS resolution in Azure Firewall and Firewall Policy. The specified FQDNs in your rule collections are translated to IP addresses based on your firewall DNS settings. This capability allows you to filter outbound traffic using FQDNs with any TCP/UDP protocol (including NTP, SSH, RDP, and more). As this capability is based on DNS resolution, it is highly recommended you enable the DNS proxy to ensure name resolution is consistent with your protected virtual machines and firewall. Deploy Azure Firewall without public IP address in Forced Tunnel modeThe Azure Firewall service requires a public IP address for operational purposes. While secure, some deployments prefer not to expose a public IP address directly to the Internet. In such cases, you can deploy Azure Firewall in Forced Tunnel mode. This configuration creates a management NIC which is used by Azure Firewall for its operations. The Tenant Datapath network can be configured without a public IP address, and Internet traffic can be forced tunneled to another firewall or completely blocked. Forced Tunnel mode cannot be configured at run time. You can either redeploy the Firewall or use the stop and start facility to reconfigure an existing Azure Firewall in Forced Tunnel mode. Firewalls deployed in Secure Hubs are always deployed in Forced Tunnel mode. Outbound SNAT supportAll outbound virtual network traffic IP addresses are translated to the Azure Firewall public IP (Source Network Address Translation). You can identify and allow traffic originating from your virtual network to remote Internet destinations. Azure Firewall doesn't SNAT when the destination IP is a private IP range per IANA RFC 1918. If your organization uses a public IP address range for private networks, Azure Firewall will SNAT the traffic to one of the firewall private IP addresses in AzureFirewallSubnet. You can configure Azure Firewall to not SNAT your public IP address range. For more information, see Azure Firewall SNAT private IP address ranges. You can monitor SNAT port utilization in Azure Firewall metrics. Learn more and see our recommendation on SNAT port utilization in our firewall logs and metrics documentation. Inbound DNAT supportInbound Internet network traffic to your firewall public IP address is translated (Destination Network Address Translation) and filtered to the private IP addresses on your virtual networks. Multiple public IP addressesYou can associate multiple public IP addresses (up to 250) with your firewall. This enables the following scenarios:
Azure Monitor loggingAll events are integrated with Azure Monitor, allowing you to archive logs to a storage account, stream events to your Event Hub, or send them to Azure Monitor logs. For Azure Monitor log samples, see Azure Monitor logs for Azure Firewall. For more information, see Tutorial: Monitor Azure Firewall logs and metrics. Azure Firewall Workbook provides a flexible canvas for Azure Firewall data analysis. You can use it to create rich visual reports within the Azure portal. For more information, see Monitor logs using Azure Firewall Workbook. Forced tunnelingYou can configure Azure Firewall to route all Internet-bound traffic to a designated next hop instead of going directly to the Internet. For example, you may have an on-premises edge firewall or other network virtual appliance (NVA) to process network traffic before it's passed to the Internet. For more information, see Azure Firewall forced tunneling. Web categoriesWeb categories lets administrators allow or deny user access to web site categories such as gambling websites, social media websites, and others. Web categories are included in Azure Firewall Standard, but it's more fine-tuned in Azure Firewall Premium. As opposed to the Web categories capability in the Standard SKU that matches the category based on an FQDN, the Premium SKU matches the category according to the entire URL for both HTTP and HTTPS traffic. For more information about Azure Firewall Premium, see Azure Firewall Premium features. For example, if Azure Firewall intercepts an HTTPS request for www.google.com/news, the following categorization is expected:
The categories are organized based on severity under Liability, High-Bandwidth, Business Use, Productivity Loss, General Surfing, and Uncategorized. Category exceptionsYou can create exceptions to your web category rules. Create a separate allow or deny rule collection with a higher priority within the rule collection group. For example, you can configure a rule collection that allows www.linkedin.com with priority 100, with a rule collection that denies Social networking with priority 200. This creates the exception for the pre-defined Social networking web category. CertificationsAzure Firewall is Payment Card Industry (PCI), Service Organization Controls (SOC), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and ICSA Labs compliant. For more information, see Azure Firewall compliance certifications. Next steps
FeedbackSubmit and view feedback for Which of the following firewalls filters traffic based on source and destination IP addresses?The packet filtering firewall filters IP packets based on source and destination IP address, and source and destination port.
What is source IP and destination IP in firewall?Source IP is the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the device sending the IP packet (the IP unit of data transfer). Destination IP is the IP address of the device to which the packet is being sent.
What are the 3 types of firewalls?According to their structure, there are three types of firewalls – software firewalls, hardware firewalls, or both.
Do firewalls have IP addresses?All firewalls have at least two interfaces: Inside—The inside interface is typically assigned a static IP address (and this IP address typically comes from one of the three private IP address blocks—10.0. 0.0/8, 172.16. 0.0–172.31.
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