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Learn more >Cloud Firewall obtained IPS certification from ICSA Labs
Learn more >Product Introduction
Alibaba Cloud Cloud Firewall is a SaaS-based firewall solution. It delivers unified security isolation and control across multiple dimensions, including the Internet Border, VPC Border, NAT Border, Host Border, and DNS Border. As your primary network defense, it integrates the Internet firewall, VPC firewall, NAT firewalls, Host firewall, and DNS firewall to provide comprehensive protection for your internet, virtual network, and host assets.
Cloud Firewall Editions
• Outbound abnormal traffic defense and access controls
• Inbound Internet attack defense and access controls
• Basic Firewall Capability
• Provide North-South Flow Control
• Provide Network IPS for N-S Traffic
• Traffic analysis and log management
• Traffic topology
• Security Group Centralized Mgmt.
• Multi-Account Centralized Mgmt.
• Support custom protection rules
• All features provided by the Enterprise edition
• Protect traffic between multi-accounts' VPCs connected by a CEN instance
• Outbound abnormal traffic defense and access controls
• Inbound Internet attack defense and access controls
• Basic Firewall Capability
• Provide North-South Flow Control
• Provide Network IPS for N-S Traffic
• Traffic analysis and log management
• Traffic topology
• Security Group Centralized Mgmt.
• Multi-Account Centralized Mgmt.
• Support custom protection rules
• All features provided by the Enterprise edition
• Protect traffic between multi-accounts' VPCs connected by a CEN instance
Benefits
Alibaba Cloud Cloud Firewall is easy to use, stable, and reliable. Deployed across the Internet, VPC, and NAT Borders, it allows you to easily build a cloud security system with the following advantages
Cloud-native
The product supports one-click protection for public assets, including public IP addresses of ECS instances, SLB public IPs, HAVIPs, EIPs, and NAT EIPs. It also supports automatic protection for newly added assets. You can enable it instantly without altering your network architecture. This ensures immediate defense with no complex configuration, significantly reducing O&M efforts.
Elasticity and Stability
Cloud Firewall scales smoothly with your business needs, ensuring zero interruption. It also features built-in HA to guarantee superior stability.
Deep Threat Defense
It proactively detects and blocks malicious traffic in real time, including hacker attacks, vulnerability exploits, brute-force attacks, worms, mining programs, backdoor trojans, and DoS attacks. This protects your enterprise information systems and network architecture on the cloud, preventing unauthorized access and data breaches.
Flexible Billing
Small and medium-sized businesses can choose the pay-as-you-go model, while larger enterprises can opt for a subscription plan. Our billing methods are diverse and flexible.
Features
Fine-Grained Access Control
Cloud Firewall allows you to centrally manage access control policies from the Internet to services and microsegmentation policies between services. Cloud Firewall supports fine-grained access control from Layer 4 to Layer 7, including access control based on IP addresses, ports, applications, domains, and locations.
Detection and Protection of Outbound Connections
Cloud Firewall can detect and analyze the outbound connection traffic of cloud resources to help distinguish malicious requests. Cloud Firewall can display outbound connection traffic mirror sessions for your assets in real-time, helping detect suspicious hosts and breaches at the earliest opportunity.
VPC Isolation-and Control
VPC firewalls help detect and control the traffic between VPCs and the traffic between VPCs and data centers. This way, you can implement fine-grained control over the traffic between VPCs, the traffic between VPCs and data centers, and the protection against internal lateral movement attacks.
Real-Time Intrusion Detection and Protection
Cloud Firewall uses the built-in threat detection engine and threat intelligence to block and intercept malicious traffic intrusions and common attacks on the Internet in real-time, including command executions, reverse shells, database attacks, mining and trojan programs, viruses, and worms.
Virtual Patch Protection for Vulnerabilities
Cloud Firewall can integrate with Security Center to detect vulnerabilities exploited by hackers to launch attacks on your Internet-facing assets. Cloud Firewall also provides virtual patches to defend against these vulnerabilities, including zero-day vulnerabilities. This way, you can prevent your assets from being intruded using vulnerabilities.
Control of Asset Exposure Risks
Cloud Firewall allows you to centrally manage and analyze assets exposed to the Internet (such as EIPs, public IP addresses of ECS instances, SLB instances, and ENIs). Cloud Firewall also supports fine-grained access control and Internet risk defense, helping reduce the network attack surface.
Multi-Account Management
Cloud Firewall supports the Resource Management features to help implement centralized security control over resources of multiple accounts (such as resource protection integration, security policy configurations, attack protections, and viewing log statistics). This helps improve the efficiency of security O&M.
Visualized Traffic Analysis
Cloud Firewall can display the traffic information in a visualized manner (such as the traffic information and traffic trend charts of all public IP addresses, statistics on top inbound and outbound traffic, and the trend charts and distribution of traffic across VPCs), helping monitor the outbound traffic for your Internet-facing assets and internal assets.
Network Log Audit and Analysis
Cloud Firewall supports the log audit feature for log records (including traffic logs, event logs, and operation logs) to help audit network traffic in real-time. For example, you can audit and track attack defense logs and hit results of access control rules.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Alibaba Cloud | Vendor F |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Network Asset Protection | ||
| Internet Traffic | ✔ | ✔ |
| VPC-to-VPC Traffic | ✔ | ✔ |
| NAT Gateway Traffic | ✔ | ✔ |
| Auto-sync and Protection for Public Assets | ✔ | ✖ |
| Elastic High Availability | ✔ | Requires separate deployment of HA components |
| Multi-account Management | ✔ | Requires separate purchase of a Manager component |
| Intrusion Prevention & Access Control | ||
| IPS Basic Protection | ✔ | ✔ |
| Threat Intelligence | ✔ | ✔ |
| Emergency Vulnerability Patching | 3 hours | 24+ hours |
| Intelligent Defense | ✔ | ✖ |
| Outbound Sensitive Data Detection | ✔ | ✖ |
| Intelligent Address Book | ✔ | ✖ |
| Traffic Visualization & Analysis | ||
| Anomaly Detection for Traffic Trends | ✔ | ✔ |
| Public Exposure Analysis | ✔ | ✔ |
| Proactive Outbound Connection Analysis | ✔ | ✖ |
| VPC Inter-Access Analysis | ✔ | ✖ |
| AI Tool Access Traffic Analysis | ✔ | ✖ |
Scenarios
Security Capabilities Required for Internet-Facing Asset Protection and Control
Cloud Firewall provides automatic protection for your Internet-facing assets. It combines network-wide threat intelligence and virtual patch features to protect your Internet-facing assets against attacks. In addition, Cloud Firewall allows you to sort your Internet-facing assets and control access to your Internet-facing assets.
Highlights
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Prevention of Risks Introduced by the Exposure of on-Cloud Assets to the InternetYou can easily handle the security issues caused by the exposure of cloud assets.
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Access Policy and Security Specification Management
Cloud Firewall helps check the access policies for inbound and outbound traffic.
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Cloud Firewall Solutions in Hybrid Cloud Scenarios
You can deploy a cloud firewall among multiple VPCs or between a VPC and a data center to isolate VPCs and defend against lateral movement attacks. You can also deploy Cloud Firewall to protect leased line connections between a VPC and a data center in hybrid cloud scenarios.
Highlights
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Traffic Security between VPCs
Cloud Firewall can help you detect and control the traffic between multiple VPCs.
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Prevention of Risks Introduced by Access between VPCs and Data Centers
The control and protection feature for the traffic between VPCs also applies to the traffic between VPCs and data centers.
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Meeting the Requirements of Classified Protection of Cybersecurity
You can deploy Cloud Firewall to meet the level 2 and level 3 requirements of Classified Protection of Cybersecurity 2.0 (such as requirements for border protection, access control, intrusion prevention, malicious code prevention, spam prevention, and security audit).
Highlights
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Classified Protection of Cybersecurity
You can deploy Cloud Firewall to meet the requirements of Classified Protection of Cybersecurity 2.0 (such as requirements for zone border protection, network access control, network intrusion prevention, and traffic security audit).
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Customer Stories
Alibaba Cloud has delivered reliable and powerful products and services to support our business over the years. We are excited to continue working with Alibaba Cloud to deliver trusted digital solutions to our customers, empowering our growth and efficiency with AI!
Dr. Luan Huanbo | Founder and CEO of 6Estates
We utilize Cloud Firewall for its rich features (like access control, traffic analysis, and intrusion prevention). This service offers real-time monitoring of network traffic, allowing us to set and enforce security policies easily. It also aids in detecting and mitigating potential network threats, ensuring the security and stability of our cloud environment.
Alibaba Cloud's extensive product offerings (such as storage, computing, security, and networking) meet our various needs and expectations.
Kan Tse | HRIS, Chow Sang Sang Holdings International Ltd.
In order to ensure a secure, stable, smooth digital experience, Chow Sang Sang adopted a combination of basic Alibaba Cloud products to store, process, and provide access to data. Chow Sang Sang uses multiple security products (such as Web Application Firewall (WAF), Cloud Firewall, and Bastionhost) to safeguard and manage their security online.
Hundsun & IHS Markit China is proud to be one of the first financial institutions to deploy its core bank application systems on Alibaba FinCloud. Hundsun & IHS Markit China hopes to continue its fruitful partnership with Alibaba Cloud by experimenting with more services and innovating new solutions together.
Hundsun & IHS Markit China adopted a range of Alibaba Cloud Security products and services, including Anti-DDoS, WAF, KMS, Bastionhost, and Cloud Firewall while closely with Alibaba Cloud's Compliance Team to meet IT regulations for financial institutions set by the People’s Bank of China.
Tonghai Financial is planning to migrate more applications and systems to Alibaba Cloud in the future. Its IT engineers can focus on their jobs and minimize the workload on building infrastructure and hardware maintenance.
The support of Alibaba Cloud can guarantee the agility and scalability of its IT infrastructure. Alibaba Cloud's full range of security solutions (such as Anti-DDoS, Cloud Firewall, and Security Center) enhanced the security posture of Tonghai Financial and helped fulfill regulatory requirements.
Kiplepay looks forward to continuing its growth with Alibaba Cloud as a strategic partner and provider. It hopes to continue powering payment ecosystems for its customers and clients, growing their confidence and trust in Kiplepay in the market.
Ricky Lew | Chief Executive Officer, Kiplepay Sdn. Bhd.
Alibaba Cloud's Cloud Firewall, Web Application Firewall (WAF), and Security Center monitoring services protect Kiplepay's backend processing from cyber-attacks and handle vulnerabilities and systems baseline, enabling smooth daily business operations that enhance the user experience.
Alibaba Cloud provides dynamic scaling capabilities to automatically provision and de-provision cloud resources based on workload requirements. Key Links wanted to tap into these capabilities to overcome its business challenges and chose Alibaba Cloud as its cloud partner.
Key Links leveraged Cloud Firewall to set policies, safeguard its network, and control the traffic originating from the Internet. It used Web Application Firewall (WAF) to identify and mitigate real-time threats (such as malicious traffic) from end-user-facing interfaces.
The partnership with Alibaba Cloud helped Matrix operate a secure and regulated global trading and clearing venue, optimize infrastructure costs, and expand its operations in the UAE.
Basab Banerjee | CIO of Matrix
Matrix deployed a variety of cloud-based security products, such as Alibaba Cloud Anti-DDoS, Cloud Firewall, and Web Application Firewall (WAF), to bolster the overall security capabilities of its trading platform.
