Written by Mark Gakman, Senior Product Manager, Azure Networking
This blog was co-authored by Gopikrishna Kannan, Principal Program Manager, Azure Networking.
Network security policies are constantly evolving to keep pace with the demands of workloads. With the acceleration of workloads to the cloud, network security policies—Azure Firewall policies in particular—are frequently changing and often updated multiple times in a week (in many cases several times in a day). Over time, the Azure Firewall network and application rules grow and can become suboptimal, impacting the firewall performance and security. For example, high volume and frequently hit rules can be unintentionally prioritized lower. In some cases, applications are hosted in a network that has been migrated to a different network. However, the firewall rules referencing older networks have not been deleted.
Optimizing Firewall rules is a challenging task for any IT team. Especially for large, geographically dispersed organizations, optimizing Azure Firewall policy can be manual, complex, and involve multiple teams across the world. Updates are risky and can potentially impact a critical production workload causing serious downtime. Well, not anymore!
Policy Analytics has been developed to help IT teams manage Azure Firewall rules over time. It provides critical insights and recommendations for optimizing Azure Firewall rules with a goal of strengthening your security posture. We are now excited to share that Policy Analytics for Azure Firewall is now in preview.
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