Microsoft's recent announcement of its upcoming Azure Gateway Load Balancer is great news for organizations requiring rapidly scalable firewalls with high availability in public cloud. Cisco has partnered with Microsoft and will be supporting Cisco Secure Firewall with Azure Gateway Load Balancer. The Gateway Load Balancer makes rapid scaling of security services with highly available protection simpler than ever. It's part of how Cisco is helping to harmonize security across your public and hybrid cloud environments.

What does this mean for Cisco Secure Firewall customers?

The 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 Firewall, without requiring any routing changes. This is another example of how Secure Firewall drives efficiency at scale. Additionally, the integration simplifies deployment, managing, and scaling of your firewalling. This reduces operational complexity, providing a single entry and exit point for traffic at the firewall. With the gateway load balancer, your applications and infrastructure maintain visibility of source IP address, which is critical in some environments.

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 possibility of having to re-architect-Cisco Secure Firewall can be inserted in the existing network architecture without changes, providing win/win outcomes across NetOps, SecOps, DevOps, and application teams.
• Firewalling where and when you need it-Easily insert and remove Secure Firewall and its associated security services, including IPS, malware defense, and URL filtering as needed in the network path.
• Greater visibility for your applications-Say goodbye to source and destination NAT to simplify enablement of your intended infrastructure. No additional configuration needed.
• Health monitoring-Continuous health-checks via Gateway Load Balancer monitors health of virtual firewall instances, ensuring efficient routing.

Inbound Use-case

Outbound Use-case

Azure Gateway Load Balancer support for Cisco Secure Firewall

will be available in 2022.

Watch the demo by Eric Kostlan:

Cisco Secure Firewall and Azure Gateway Load Balancer Integration

Additional Resources

Microsoft Azure Gateway Load Balancer Announcement

Cisco Secure Firewall

Cisco Secure Firewall At-a-Glance

Cisco Secure Firewall for Public Cloud