13 Best Managed Firewalls To Safeguard Cloud Infrastructure in 2024

Google Cloud NGFW is a next-generation firewall service designed for cloud environments. It includes an intrusion prevention system powered by Palo Alto Networks to protect against spyware, malware, and command-and-control attacks.

Google Cloud NGFW allows for easy updating of firewall rules using firewall policies that group multiple rules. These policies control connections based on configurations and can be applied hierarchically across an organization or globally/regionally to target specific regions.

Its identity and access management (IAM) governed tags enable granular control and micro-segmentation. Additionally, Google Cloud NGFW offers advanced protection with geolocation objects, fully qualified domain name (FQDN) objects, and Google Cloud Threat Intelligence lists for firewall rules.

Google Cloud NGFW Pricing

Google Cloud NGFW pricing depends on traffic throughput and includes additional costs for add-on manageability products. The Essentials plan is free.

– The Standard and Enterprise plan cost $0.018 per GB of data processed. The Enterprise plan also has a $1.75 hourly endpoint deployment fee.

– Hierarchical Firewall Policies cost $1 per VM for 500 or fewer attributes and $1.50 for 501 or more.

– Firewall Insights charges $1 per existing rule for configuration analysis and $0.20 per million log entries for overgranting analysis.

Perimeter 81 offers a firewall-as-a-service to manage traffic between network resources, users, and environments, providing visibility of all corporate data at rest and in transit.

Perimeter 81 makes defining rules for how and when traffic enters your network easier. It is fully scalable, so when your company grows, you can create and alter network policies with just a few clicks.

With Perimeter 81, you can segment Layer 3 and Layer 4 access based on user or group identity, empowering you to tightly control access to your cloud network at the granular level.

Perimeter 81’s firewall-as-a-service can help you enforce traffic encryption, DNS filtering, and more to protect your company. For remote workers, you can deploy private gateways worldwide to reduce latency.

Perimeter 81 Pricing

The Essentials plan costs $8 per user/month, Premium is $12/user/month, and Premium Plus is $16/user/month, each with an additional $40 per gateway monthly. The Enterprise plan offers custom pricing.

Check Point Quantum firewall is an AI-powered NextGenration Firewall (NGFW) that offers the highest-rated threat prevention, unified policy management, and seamless scalability.

Quantum NGFW includes various features to enhance your company’s network security, including Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), and virtual private network (VPN). It takes a zero-trust approach to protecting your network.

As its protection goes beyond signature-based defenses, the Check Point Quantum NGFW can protect your network from zero-day attacks. Moreover, it can inspect SSL/TLS with minimal network latency.

Check Point Quantum NGFW has a shared threat intelligence feature to enhance security by sharing threat intelligence with your organization’s security infrastructure. Its key features include network segmentation, sandboxing, data loss prevention, intrusion prevention systems, and more.

Barracuda Web Application Firewall offers robust and comprehensive protection for websites and applications against advanced cyber threats. It simplifies application security with quick deployment and requires no steep learning curve.

Ideal for agile and DevOps environments, the Barracuda Web Application Firewall includes unmetered DDoS protection and integrates seamlessly with cloud-native services, ensuring security and control.

Barracuda Web Application Firewall safeguards applications, APIs, and mobile app backends against attacks, including the OWASP Top 10 and zero-day threats. It offers advanced bot protection, distinguishing between legitimate and malicious bots using machine learning.

Barracuda Firewall also enables granular access control, integrates with various authentication services, and offers single-sign-on and two-factor authentication features. Additionally, it supports automation and orchestration through integration with popular DevOps tools, ensuring seamless CI/CD practices.

Zscaler is a cloud-based firewall that helps you secure your web and non-web traffic for all users, applications, and locations.

Zscaler Zero Trust Firewall stands out with its robust traffic inspection capabilities. It terminates malicious connections and prevents threats using unlimited inline inspection and native TLS/SSL decryption. It also offers advanced bandwidth control, prioritizing business-critical applications to enhance user experience and reduce IT costs.

Zscaler Zero Trust Firewall features include advanced attack detection for identifying cyber threats on nonstandard ports, secure internet breakouts for better user experiences, always-on cloud IPS (Intrusion Prevention Service) with custom signatures, and superior DNS performance and security to protect users from malicious sites.

SonicWall NSv Series virtual firewall combines physical firewall security with virtualization benefits like scalability, agility, and cost reduction. It protects cloud environments from attacks and ensures system resilience, uptime, service delivery, and regulatory compliance with distributed clustering support.

SonicWall NSv Series firewall offers flexible deployment options, delivering next-gen firewall security to private clouds (ESXi, Hyper-V), public clouds (AWS, Azure), and hybrid environments.

With SonicWall’s Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI™) technology, you get real-time, enhanced protection against zero-day threats and unknown malware. The RTDMI engine works with the Capture Advanced Threat Protection sandboxing service to detect and block threats as they happen by inspecting memory directly.

Its unified management reduces configuration errors and deployment time, enhancing your security posture while maintaining a low cost of ownership.

Sophos firewall offers unmatched security and performance optimized for the modern encrypted internet. It provides full next-gen firewall capabilities and integrates with Sophos Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) for automated threat response and synchronized security, stopping threats before they escalate.

Sophos firewall also integrates with cloud-delivered security solutions, including DNS protection and zero-day threat protection. Its comprehensive SD-WAN capabilities ensure secure orchestration across various locations.

Sophos firewall’s built-in zero-trust network access (ZTNA) simplifies secure remote access. With cloud management and reporting from Sophos Central, you can manage all your firewalls, wireless networks, switches, endpoints, servers, and more from a single platform.

Netgate pfSense Plus is a stateful firewall that tracks network sessions individually, using stateful packet inspection for fine-grained security. It can block traffic based on policy matches or inspect without blocking by adding pass rules.

Netgate pfSense Plus includes IP/DNS-based filtering to block web traffic from specific countries, enhancing cybersecurity. The anti-spoofing feature detects and blocks packets with fake addresses. This prevents attackers from disguising malicious traffic as legitimate, protecting your network from potential threats.

Netgate pfSense has a firewall connection limit policy to manage traffic by checking specific details: source address, destination address, service type, and connection count. Monitoring these details can detect unusual connection requests and allow or deny traffic based on predefined rules.

Netgate pfSense has an intrusion detection system (IDS) that blocks malicious packets. Its other security features include, but are not limited to, a Snort-based packet analyzer, IP block list analyzer, false-positive alert suspension, Deep packet Inspection (DPI), and more.

Considering its features, it is one of the most popular open-source firewalls.

Netgate pfSense Pricing:

Netgate pfSense Plus offers flexible deployment: pre-loaded Netgate appliances from $189, cloud options on AWS/Azure from $0.01/hour, and software-only installations for $129/year.

Imperva Cloud WAF is a cloud-based web application firewall that protects your website from various application layer attacks. It ensures continuous defense without needing on-premises hardware.

By leveraging advanced security algorithms, Imperva Cloud WAF provides a robust barrier against evolving hacking techniques. It protects your web application from OWASP’s Top 10 security threats, such as cross-site scripting, blocking attacks, and more.

Combining it with the Imperva Application Security solution stack can protect your web application from a bot that leverages SQL injection, DDoS attacks, and various other attacks.

You can use Impreva WAF in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure, AWS, on-premises,  or as a cloud service. It can protect many applications, including API & microservices, third-party applications, active and legacy applications, containers, VMs, and more.

Is your website growing? No worries. Imperva Cloud WAF offers scalability and flexibility to meet large organizations’ complex security requirements. It is a part of Imperva’s market-leading, full-stack application security solution.

Palo Alto NGFW is a next-generation firewall using machine learning, a type of AI, to protect networks. This innovation allows it to detect zero-day threats autonomously, even if it’s the first time the attack occurs.

Operating at the Application Layer, Palo Alto NGFW examines traffic across packets, not just the headers. This technique enhances its ability to detect anomalies. It provides comprehensive security features such as secure socket layer offloading, DDoS protection, micro-segmentation, data loss prevention, anomaly-based threat detection, blocklisting, and listing.

SSL offloading allows Palo Alto NGFW to manage encrypted traffic, decrypting it for inspection and re-encrypting it for delivery.

FortiGate VM is an award-winning next-generation firewall. Independent research shows it is one of the most effective firewalls available.

FortiGate VM continuously enforces zero-trust policies to increase security. It comes with built-in integrations across all the popular cloud platforms. You can also use it to create a flexible, scalable, fast, and secure software-defined wide area network in the cloud and on-premises. Its key administration features include, but are not limited to, policy management, logging and reporting, concurrent sessions, and more.

FortiGate VM protects your cloud with an intrusion detection and prevention system. Its other functions include a virtual private network (VPN), URL filtering, antivirus, and more. It also has a user-friendly interface.

You can use Fortigate VM to protect your network from external threats and unauthorized access, create application-specific security and traffic policies, leverage AI/ML-driven threat intelligence to discover threats in egress and ingress traffic, segment your network, and more. If you have remote workers, it can help them securely access your network with an SD-WAN and IPsec VPN.

Azure Firewall is the cloud-managed firewall that protects your Azure Virtual Network resources. The stateful firewall service offers high availability and unlimited scalability, letting you create, enforce, and log policies across subscriptions and virtual networks.

Azure Firewall comes with threat intelligence–based filtering to receive real-time alerts and block traffic from known malicious IP addresses and domains. This feature helps you avoid potential threats by actively monitoring and denying harmful connections.

The intrusion detection and prevention system of Azure Firewall uses signatures to monitor activities, generate alerts, log data, and optionally block attacks. It detects non-encrypted attacks on all ports and protocols, with TLS inspection for encrypted traffic.

Azure Firewall Pricing

Azure Firewall pricing includes a fixed hourly rate and a data processing charge per gigabyte. However, costs can vary based on regions, usage, and specific features enabled, such as threat intelligence or additional security capabilities.

AWS Network Firewall is a managed cloud firewall best suited to secure your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). It features a flexible rules engine to define detailed firewall rules, a stateful firewall that considers the context for precise policy enforcement, and web filtering to manage web traffic.

AWS Network Firewall allows you to manage security policies centrally across all your VPC accounts. Whenever you add new accounts, it automatically enforces mandatory security policies on new accounts.

AWS Network Firewall checks active traffic with protocol detection, stateful inspection, and more to prevent intrusion into inbound internet traffic. You can also use it to secure AWS Direct Connect and VPN traffic.

AWS Network Firewall Pricing

AWS Network Firewall pricing is based on hourly charges for each firewall endpoint and per-gigabyte charges for data processed through the firewall, with additional charges for advanced inspection features. Visit the AWS Network Firewall pricing page to see how much you’ll pay based on your region and requirements.