Today, we are thrilled to announce two key enhancements to Cloud NGFW for Azure by Palo Alto Networks: multidimensional auto scaling and Azure-native AppInsights integration. These features reinforce our commitment to delivering a fully managed, cloud-native security service that keeps pace with the demands of your business.
Organizations today are balancing speed, scale and security in an environment where one misstep can lead to a breach or burnout. They aim to move fast, stay secure, and simplify operations, all at once. This is because the security landscape is becoming increasingly complex and dangerous as multicloud strategies continue to grow, with more than two public clouds and 38% year-over-year growth.
The operational complexity of securing multiple cloud environments introduces a higher potential for misconfigurations, which are a leading cause of data breaches, affecting 99% of organizations. Compounding this issue is the fact that 79% of organizations acknowledge visibility gaps of their assets, which can result in three times more security incidents. Furthermore, traditional tools lack the necessary cloud-native integration and visibility to effectively scale multicloud protection. This creates operational burdens, such as manual scaling and tuning, that drain valuable resources and can result in security gaps.
To address these challenges, Cloud NGFW for Azure by Palo Alto Networks provides fully managed, cloud-native network security that is designed to keep pace with the dynamic demands of your business. This solution provides superior security outcomes and a lower total cost of ownership by allowing organizations to protect applications and data with ML-powered threat prevention and centralized control that is built for cloud speed and scale.
Azure-Native Agility and Operational Excellence
Organizations are often tasked with balancing speed, scale and security. Our new capabilities for Cloud NGFW for Azure directly address this challenge by providing operational excellence and performance efficiency.
Multidimensional Auto Scaling
This new capability ensures that your security scales dynamically with your workloads. Traffic can be dropped when a firewall becomes overwhelmed and can't process a high volume of connections. A high number of connections can consume available memory and CPU, also leading to dropped packets. Similarly, an increase in network throughput can saturate the firewall's processing capabilities, causing it to drop traffic to maintain stability.
Traditionally, managing these fluctuations manually is difficult and can drain valuable resources. Organizations are tasked with balancing speed, scale, and security, and the operational burdens of manual scaling and tuning can lead to security gaps. Multidimensional auto scaling automatically adapts to changes in session count, CPU and throughput, guaranteeing high performance and 99.99% availability even during peak traffic demands.
Azure-Native AppInsights Integration
We've delivered on the promise of seamless integration and visibility. Cloud NGFW now publishes custom metrics directly to Azure AppInsights, providing real-time visibility and a single pane of glass for monitoring firewall health, usage and performance. This native integration is essential for proactive threat management, maintaining uptime and enabling your teams to operate with the agility of the cloud.
Security That Works at the Speed of Your Business
These advancements are more than just features—they are differentiators that provide our customers with industry-leading agility, efficiency and visibility in Azure. By automating scalable protection and providing real-time, native insights, we empower you to accelerate your cloud adoption securely and confidently. Cloud NGFW for Azure is a purpose-built solution that ensures your security infrastructure is an enabler of business agility, not a bottleneck.
These latest innovations build on the foundation of the Cloud NGFW platform, which provides AI-powered Layer 7 threat prevention to stop known, unknown and evasive threats in real-time. With our fully managed FWaaS, you can deploy in minutes without the burden of infrastructure management.
A Strategic Evolution of the Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft Partnership
Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for Azure has been recognized as a Featured Partner on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. This milestone reinforces our shared commitment to enabling secure digital transformation through intelligent, fully managed cloud network security and builds on the momentum our joint solution with Microsoft has already achieved, including real-world customer success with ON2IT, integration with Strata Cloud Manager, and new AI-driven capabilities.
Our collaboration with Microsoft marks three key advancements:
- Product Maturity: Cloud NGFW for Azure continues to deliver real-world results with high availability, centralized policy man andnt and AI-powered threat prevention. The solution aligns with the Azure Well-Architected Framework, delivering on security, operational excellence and performance efficiency. Azure-native integration with Azure AppInsights and Cloud NGFW multidimensional auto scaling provides integrated visibility and elastic workload protection capabilities that are unique to our combined solution.
- Customer Adoption: Enterprise adopters like ON2IT are scaling secure environments faster and more efficiently. Our fully managed FWaaS simplifies operations, deploying in under an hour with no infrastructure burden, and provides deep application and user visibility via App-ID and User-ID. We also offer centralized policy management through Strata Cloud Manager, unifying policies across subscriptions, regions and accounts.
- Procurement Readiness: Cloud NGFW is now a Featured Partner on the Azure Marketplace, with full MACC eligibility and flexible consumption models. This recognition means Cloud NGFW for Azure has met Microsoft's highest standards for security, scalability and customer success, allowing organizations to onboard faster and reduce procurement friction.
Get Started with Cloud NGFW for Azure Today
Cloud NGFW for Azure is designed for organizations building secure, cloud-native applications and protecting mission-critical workloads. Explore and start a free trial of Cloud NGFW for Azure to experience these new capabilities and the peace of mind that comes with enterprise-grade security and Azure-native simplicity. You can also talk to your Palo Alto Networks representative about securing your Azure workloads through the Azure Marketplace or MACC.