We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and Microsoft Sentinel based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Microsoft Security Suite solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Azure Firewall is a cloud-native solution that removes the pain of load balancers."
"Microsoft's technical support is very good. They're quite knowledgable and responsive."
"The solution should be capable of self-scaling, which is one of the features we like about it."
"The most valuable feature is threat intelligence. It is based on filtering and can identify multiple threats."
"We secure the entry point to the virtual data center with the firewall."
"The solution can autoscale."
"In terms of the reporting, it's beautiful. It integrates with Azure monitoring and with Azure policies. That piece is a big help. You can set governing policies and you can use the application firewall, as well as the Azure Firewall, to enforce those policies."
"The feature that I have found the most valuable is the control over the network permissions and the network."
"It is always correlating to IOCs for normal attacks, using Azure-related resources. For example, if any illegitimate IP starts unusual activity on our Azure firewall, then it automatically generates an alarm for us."
"Microsoft Sentinel enables you to ingest data from the entire ecosystem and that connection of data helps you to monitor critical resources and to know what's happening in the environment."
"If you know how to do KQL (kusto query language) queries, which are how you query the log data inside Sentinel, the information is pretty rich. You can get down to a good level of detail regarding event information or notifications."
"The scalability is great. You can put unlimited logs in, as long as you can pay for it. There are commitment tiers, up to six terabytes per day, which is nowhere close to what any one of our customers is running."
"Sentinel has features that have helped improve our security poster. It helped us in going ahead and identifying the gaps via analysis and focusing on the key elements."
"There are some very powerful features to Sentinel, such as the integration of various connectors. We have a lot of departments that use both IaaS and SaaS services, including M365 as well as Azure services. The ability to leverage connectors into these environments allows for large-scale data injection."
"The UI of Sentinel is very good and easy to use, even for beginners."
"The Log analytics are useful."
"The solution lacks artificial intelligence and machine learning. It might be in the roadmap. However, currently, it's not available."
"An Azure firewall is not a real firewall."
"It is a cloud service, but the lending speed for each region is not always the same. For example, in China, the speed is slow. They need to think about how to make sure that the service pace or speed is always the same in all regions. It would be a great improvement if they can provide the same pace worldwide."
"There is room for further integration of AI into the system."
"Azure has new versions including a premium firewall. But I would like to see them not put the premium features on Azure Firewall Premium alone because it is quite expensive."
"It would be much easier if the on-premises, firewall rules, had some kind of export-import possibility in place, which is not the case right now."
"Azure Firewall has limited visibility for IDPS, no TLS inspection, no app ID, no user ID, no content ID, no device ID. There is no antivirus or anti-spyware. Azure Firewall doesn't scan traffic for malware unless it triggers an IDPS signature. There is no sandbox or machine learning functionality, meaning we are not protected from Zero-day threats. There is no DNS security and limited web categories."
"The interface could be improved, it's not very user friendly."
"I can't think of anything other than just getting the name out there. I think a lot of customers don't fully understand the full capabilities of Azure Sentinel yet. It is kind of like when they're first starting to use Azure, it might not be something they first think about. So, they should just kind of get to the point where it is more widely used."
"If you're looking to use canned queries, the interface could be a little more straightforward. It's not immediately intuitive regarding how you use it. You have to take a canned query and paste it into an operational box and then you hit a button... They could improve the ease of deploying these queries."
"It has been a challenge with Azure Sentinel to onboard the Syslog server from FortiGate. Azure Sentinel can work better on that shift between the Syslog server and a firewall."
"We have been working with multiple customers, and every time we onboard a customer, we are missing an essential feature that surprisingly doesn't exist in Sentinel. We searched the forums and knowledge bases but couldn't find a solution. When you onboard new customers, you need to enable the data connectors. That part is easy, but you must create rules from scratch for every associated connector. You click "next," "next," "next," and it requires five clicks for each analytical rule. Imagine we have a customer with 150 rules."
"The learning curve could be improved. I am still learning it. We were able to implement the basic features to get them up and running, but there are still so many things that I don't know about all its features. They have a lot of features that we have not been able to use or apply. If they could work on reducing the solution's learning curve, that would be good. While there is a training course held by Microsoft to learn more about this solution, there is a cost associated with it."
"The solution should allow for a streamlined CI/CD procedure."
"Everyone has their favorites. There is always room for improvement, and everybody will say, "I wish you could do this for me or that for me." It is a personal thing based on how you use the tool. I do not necessarily have those thoughts, and they are probably not really valuable because they are unique to the context of the user, but broadly, where it can continue to improve is by adding more connectors to more systems."
"There is room for improvement in entity behavior and the integration site."
Azure Firewall is ranked 14th in Microsoft Security Suite with 33 reviews while Microsoft Sentinel is ranked 6th in Microsoft Security Suite with 85 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Microsoft Sentinel is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Sentinel writes "Gives a comprehensive and holistic view of the ecosystem and improves visibility and the ability to respond". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and Fortinet FortiGate, whereas Microsoft Sentinel is most compared with AWS Security Hub, IBM Security QRadar, Splunk Enterprise Security, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Elastic Security. See our Azure Firewall vs. Microsoft Sentinel report.
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