A web application firewall (WAF) recently became available as part of Azure’s Application Gateway Firewall offering. When migrating existing applications to Azure, WAF ensures web applications are being properly secured by inspecting incoming requests to your web server and filtering out potentially harmful traffic based on a configuration set of rules. This new offering is significant news for any organization using web applications – which happens to be nearly every business today.

Why is Microsoft’s WAF offering a big deal? There are three major reasons:

1. Protection: Microsoft’s WAF offering will prevent many types of malicious activities from reaching your website.
2. Ease of Use: Microsoft’s WAF offering can be easily configured from the Azure portal. It allows you to add a security layer to your web applications without having to modify your existing web applications.
3. Monitoring: Microsoft’s WAF offering logs activity so that it can be analyzed in order to refine the configuration of your WAF.

A Great Solution for Lift and Shift Web Migrations

Many organizations are opting to perform Lift and Shift migrations to move their existing websites to Azure Virtual Machines. This simpler approach provides teams with the benefits of the cloud without investing in the specialized skills and time required to update their web applications using a Microsoft PAAS offering.

As web applications are increasingly becoming targets of malicious attacks, organizations performing lift and shift migrations need to stay up to date with current security best practices. Prior to Microsoft including a WAF offering as part of their Application Gateway solution, there hasn’t been a reliable, cost-effective web firewall application in Azure. Jump to today, organizations can now count on Microsoft’s WAF offering to secure their VM-based web applications.

Whether large or small, businesses in virtually every industry are vulnerable to attacks. Now is the time to strengthen your resilience by implementing an Application Gateway WAF. If you’re looking for a strategic partner who can address your cyber-risk management needs, contact us to learn more about our security solutions and how to leverage the latest technology to prevent against future cyber threats.