AWS has unveiled the AWS Network Firewall in an effort to help customers protect their cloud-based virtual networks.
AWS is currently the top cloud platform, with 31% of the cloud computing market. One of AWS’ biggest strengths is the breadth and depth of services the platform offers.
The company is building on that with its latest announcement, AWS Network Firewall, “a high availability, managed network firewall service” for virtual private clouds (VPC). The new service complements the other firewall capabilities AWS currently provides, such as “Security Groups to protect Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, Network ACLs to protect Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) subnets, AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect web applications running on Amazon CloudFront, Application Load Balancer (ALB) or Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Shield to protect against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.”
The AWS Network Firewall can be setup with just a few clicks, and the company touts its ability to scale as needed, eliminating the need to manage additional infrastructure.
“With AWS Network Firewall, you can implement customized rules to prevent your VPCs from accessing unauthorized domains, to block thousands of known-bad IP addresses, or identify malicious activity using signature-based detection,” writes Channy Yun is a Principal Developer Advocate for AWS. “AWS Network Firewall makes firewall activity visible in real-time via CloudWatch metrics and offers increased visibility of network traffic by sending logs to S3, CloudWatch and Kinesis Firehose. Network Firewall is integrated with AWS Firewall Manager, giving customers who use AWS Organizations a single place to enable and monitor firewall activity across all your VPCs and AWS accounts. Network Firewall is interoperable with your existing security ecosystem, including AWS partners such as CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, and Splunk. You can also import existing rules from community maintained Suricata rulesets.”
The news is a welcome addition to AWS’ cybersecurity services and will help customers keep their VPCs even safer.