Microsoft unveils Azure Virtual WAN and Azure Firewall

Microsoft just announced a public preview of two new offerings designed to help organizations with connectivity and security, Azure Virtual WAN and Azure Firewall.

Azure Virtual WAN is made to simplify branch connectivity on a large scale for enterprises. And Azure Firewall is made to enforce your network security policies while allowing you to take advantage of the scale and simplicity that’s provided to you by the cloud. Here’s some more information about each of these new offerings and what they can provide for your organizations.

About Azure Virtual WAN

Microsoft

The new Azure Virtual WAN offering allows you to take advantage of optimized and automated branch connectivity on a global scale. To accomplish this, the tool lets you seamlessly connect your branches to Azure using SD-WAN and VPN devices. It also offers automated connectivity and configuration management to ensure that you get a simple and intuitive user experience.

Here’s how it works: all the traffic from your branches goes into Microsoft’s network at the Microsoft edge site that is closest to a given branch office. There are 130 of these sites or Points of Presence in Microsoft’s global network. Once your traffic is inside that network, it can terminate inside a one of your Virtual WAN’s virtual hub. You can create those hubs in different Azure regions as well since Azure has plenty of public cloud regions around the world.

Azure Virtual WAN is launching in preview through Citrix and Riverbed. It will also launch with additional partners, including Barracuda, Checkpoint, Nokia Nuage, Palo Alto, Versa Networks, and Silverspeak in the next few months.

About Azure Firewall

Azure Firewall is a new service that’s fully integrated with the Azure platform, portal UI, and services. It offers fully native firewall capabilities for all of your Virtual Network resources. It includes built-in high availability and also lets you scale with your resources automatically. Basically, you can create connectivity policies using application and network filtering rules and then enforce those policies across multiple subscriptions and virtual network. The new service is built to work with Azure’s existing security services in order to strengthen and enhance the entire security experience.

Featured image: Freerange Stock

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