DEVOPSdigest

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. announced the general availability of its industry-leading Next-Generation Cloud Firewall natively integrated with Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN to provide customers with top-notch security.

The integration provides advanced threat prevention and multi-layered network security across public, private and hybrid-clouds, enabling businesses to confidently migrate to Azure with maximum operational efficiency.

“Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN is a network-as-a-service that provides customers with a range of benefits simplifying networking, security and routing functionalities to drive scalability, cost savings and improved performance. The native integration between Azure Virtual WAN and Check Point CloudGuard (generally available) enhances and complements Azure Virtual WAN security, offering our customers centralized security in an intuitive and simple offering through the Azure Marketplace,” said Reshmi Yandapalli, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft.

As organizations grow and operate in a distributed IT environment, connectivity and cybersecurity becomes an operational challenge. In fact, Check Point Research recently reported a 48% year-over-year increase in cloud-based cyberattacks for 2022, due in large to organizations digitizing operations and moving them to the cloud. Businesses need to securely connect their cloud infrastructures while safeguarding the communication and collaboration among their workforce, partners, and customers. CloudGuard’s native integration with Azure Virtual WAN addresses this challenge by providing secure connectivity that reduces organizational risk and protects cloud assets.

“Cloud computing allows companies to add onto their cloud workloads in seconds, and they need security that is agile, reduces complexity, and is focused on prevention-first,” said TJ Gonen, VP of Cloud Security at Check Point Software Technologies. “We are proud to collaborate with Microsoft to provide Azure Virtual WAN customers with the integrated protection of CloudGuard Network Security, powered by AI, to secure their cloud instances against any advanced threats, bolstering their digital transformation with confidence.”

CloudGuard Network Security for Azure Virtual WAN provides these benefits to customers:

■ Industry-leading threat prevention: CloudGuard supports all security use cases and includes Firewall, IPS, Application Control, IPsec VPN, Anti-Virus and Anti-Bot, DLP, as well as Threat Extraction and Threat Emulation for zero-day threats. Check Point network security solutions are rated with the highest security effectiveness score of 99.7% malware prevention and the lowest false positive rate of 0.13% according to the latest Miercom benchmark report.

■ Cloud-native and integrated security: CloudGuard is built for cloud principles of elasticity, availability, resilience, and seamless support for traffic growth, and is easily deployed into the Virtual WAN hub from Azure Marketplace. CloudGuard integrates with Azure Routing Intent for security insertion – a centralized, simpler, quicker, more consistent, and scalable way to secure multi-spoke networks.

■ Greater operational efficiency and simplicity: CloudGuard can be easily and quickly deployed as a consumption-based solution. (At the time of this announcement, consumption-based billing is static with predetermined billing based on scale units.) The integration enables agile maintenance, upgrades, and updates, thus significantly reducing operational overhead.

CloudGuard Network Security for Azure Virtual WAN is generally available.