Top 5 Cloud Firewall Solutions: Deep-Dive Comparison AWS vs Azure vs GCP
Top 5 Cloud Firewall Solutions: Deep-Dive Comparison AWS vs Azure vs GCP
Running workloads across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud keeps you agile, yet it scatters your network perimeter.
In 2024 CyberRatings.org tests, AWS’s native firewall blocked only five percent of live attacks, while Azure and GCP fared only slightly better.
This guide compares the top five cloud firewalls, pinpoints where each excels, and offers layering tips you can put to work today. If you’d rather skip the DIY route, our cybersecurity team at TD SYNNEX can weave the pieces together for you.
How we chose these solutions
You deserve to see the scorecard before we rank anything.
We blended test data with operator experience, then weighted eight criteria that matter on the ground: security depth, performance, cost efficiency, ease of management, high availability, compliance posture, ecosystem fit, and future-readiness. Security carries double weight because a firewall that misses malware is just a routing tax.
Performance and cost form the next tier. You can’t afford a device that crawls during a surge or a billing model that balloons with every gigabyte. Management, availability, and compliance sit in the middle, and each can make or break daily operations. Ecosystem fit keeps your SIEM, IaC scripts, and DevOps pipelines humming. We also award a small bonus to vendors that add AI-assisted tuning or zero-trust hooks.
To ground the affordability metric in reality rather than sticker prices, our reviewers modeled each firewall’s usage profile inside the TD SYNNEX Global FinOps Practice dashboards powered by IBM Cloudability. Because that same practice curates a catalog of 100+ cloud-ready Cybersecurity Solutions from more than 50 vendor partners, its broader cybersecurity lens helped us weigh protection depth against expense when results were close. The FinOps analytics surfaced hidden surcharges—such as Azure Firewall’s per-rule processing fees and GCP Firewall Plus peak-hour multipliers—that can swell annual spend by roughly 25 % on bursty workloads. We folded those findings back into the weighted score so no product could win on paper while losing in production.
Every firewall earned a 1-to-10 score in each category, multiplied by its weight, and rolled into one transparent total. The math sets the order; the commentary ahead explains the why behind each number.
AWS Network Firewall: managed protection for AWS workloads
What it is and why it matters
AWS Network Firewall drops into your VPC and scales alongside the rest of your cloud stack. You spin up an endpoint, point your subnets at it, and Amazon handles the upkeep: patching, high availability, and capacity planning fade into the background.
The engine is Suricata-based, so you can load the same open-source or commercial rule sets your security team already trusts. In October 2023, AWS added outbound TLS inspection, letting the firewall inspect encrypted traffic without extra appliances.
If most of your workloads run in AWS and you would rather manage policy than infrastructure, Network Firewall provides a native, elastic starting point.
Where it shines
- Scale. The service runs as a managed endpoint, so you can push gigabits of traffic through it and AWS silently adds capacity. No instance sizing meetings, no weekend resize tickets.
- Integration. Suricata rule support lets you import feeds from Emerging Threats or your own SOC without rewriting syntax. With AWS Firewall Manager, you can push those rules across hundreds of accounts in a few clicks and track hits in CloudWatch.
- Availability. Each endpoint spans multiple Availability Zones, so a single-zone outage does not disrupt east-west or outbound flows. Combine it with Transit Gateway for a convenient inspection point between VPCs.
Together these strengths give AWS-centric teams a native shield that feels like part of the platform, not another box to babysit.
Where it falls short
Default threat coverage is thin. Independent testing in 2024 showed the firewall blocked only a handful of live exploits until administrators loaded custom Suricata signatures. Busy teams can miss that gap.
Costs can climb. Every gigabyte that crosses the firewall adds per-GB fees on top of the hourly endpoint charge. Push a terabyte a day through a multi-AZ setup and the invoice can rival third-party appliances that include IPS and URL filtering at a fixed price.
Rule management demands care. You juggle stateless and stateful rules, priority numbers, and VPC route tables. A single mis-ordered rule or missing route can black-hole traffic or let packets bypass inspection.
Ideal fit
Pick AWS Network Firewall when most traffic stays inside AWS, you value elastic scale, and your staff or partners are comfortable curating Suricata rule feeds. It also works as a baseline layer in defense-in-depth, with a heavier NGFW at the internet edge while Network Firewall polices east-west and outbound flows.
Microsoft Azure Firewall: centralized security in Azure
What it is and why it matters
Azure Firewall sits inside your virtual network like a sentry once you enable it. Microsoft runs the cluster, scales capacity up to 100 Gbps, and keeps availability zones in sync, so you focus on policy rather than appliance upkeep.
Two service tiers create a clear sliding scale. Standard delivers stateful filtering and FQDN rules. Premium adds TLS inspection, an intrusion-detection engine powered by Microsoft threat intelligence, and URL category filtering that resembles a next-generation firewall without an extra license.
Because the service feeds Azure Monitor, every allow, deny, or deep-inspection alert flows into the same dashboards and Sentinel workbooks your SOC already monitors. That integration turns firewall logs from another silo into data analysts can search alongside identity, container, and application signals.
If your footprint is Azure-heavy and you want one cohesive control plane that unifies network security, logs, and threat intel, Azure Firewall provides the cloud-native alignment many providers still pursue.
Where it shines
Azure Firewall’s standout trait is simplicity at scale. One deployment click spins up a zone-redundant cluster that can push 100 Gbps without a capacity-planning meeting. No image versions to track, no patch Tuesday reminders.
Policy control also feels truly centralized. A single Firewall Policy can reach across subscriptions, resource groups, and regions. Change one rule, and each hub-and-spoke VNet inherits it within minutes, closing gaps where shadow networks usually hide.
Threat-intelligence mode adds hands-off defense. Set the toggle to Deny, and the firewall automatically blocks IP addresses flagged by Microsoft’s security graph. Combine that with Premium TLS inspection and IDPS, and east-west traffic receives the same scrutiny as internet egress, a point many teams overlook until an audit looms.
Logging ties everything together. Every hit, miss, and deep-packet-inspection alert lands in Azure Monitor, ready for Sentinel queries and cost-effective long-term storage. Analysts can pivot from firewall events to identity logs without switching portals.
In short, Azure Firewall shines when you need high visibility and minimal operational effort inside an all-Microsoft estate.
Where it falls short
Premium IDPS updates happen behind a curtain. You cannot upload custom signatures or view the rule set, which frustrates teams accustomed to Suricata tuning. False positives require a support ticket instead of a quick pattern tweak.
Price is another hurdle. A firewall instance costs about 1.5 USD per hour, plus data fees. Light-traffic workloads may shrug, but steady, high-volume apps often find fixed-throughput FortiGate or Palo Alto VMs cheaper over a quarter.
Last, the policy interface can feel verbose. Network rules, application rules, web categories, and DNAT sit in separate tabs. New admins often misplace a rule and wonder why traffic bypasses the firewall.
Ideal fit
Azure Firewall excels when your organization runs mostly in Azure, values one-click high availability, and prefers Microsoft to manage updates. It also performs well as a mid-tier layer in zero-trust designs, locking down egress while a front-end WAF or third-party NGFW guards internet-facing traffic.
Google Cloud Firewall: distributed defense with Plus tier IPS
What it is and why it matters
Google takes a different approach. Instead of steering packets through a choke point, Cloud Firewall enforces rules inside the VPC fabric itself. Every VM, container, and serverless endpoint becomes a firewall node, so scale and availability come built in.
The Standard tier delivers stateful L3–L4 filtering plus extras like FQDN and geo-blocking. The new Plus tier, introduced in preview at Next ’23, adds Palo Alto Networks intrusion prevention and TLS inspection without changing your topology. You enable zonal firewall endpoints, choose a threat profile, and Google handles signature updates, autoscaling, and failover.
That distributed yet deep-inspection design places security close to each workload, trimming latency while avoiding single points of failure. For teams already committed to Google Cloud, it feels less like a bolt-on product and more like flipping a switch that was waiting all along.
Where it shines
Invisible scale. Enforcement happens inside the VPC fabric, so there is no gateway to size or patch. Traffic hits the nearest node and moves on, keeping latency low even during spikes.
Hands-off updates. Google SRE maintains the Plus IPS fleet. Signature rollouts arrive quickly, and capacity grows with demand, so you skip maintenance windows and manager appliances.
Hierarchical policy. Organization-, folder-, and project-level policies let you push one rule across hundreds of projects, closing gaps that often linger in test VPCs.
Cost flexibility. Use free Standard rules for low-risk assets and pay-per-GB Plus coverage for crown-jewel apps, aligning spend with business value.
Where it falls short
Real-world efficacy data is still limited. Early independent tests showed lower catch rates than dedicated Palo Alto VMs, suggesting Google and Palo Alto are still tuning signatures for cloud noise.
Customization is restricted. You cannot upload custom IPS rules or adjust detection profiles, so false positives require feedback and patience rather than a quick edit.
Pricing can rise quickly. Standard rules cost nothing, but Plus adds an hourly endpoint fee and a per-gigabyte charge. Sustained high throughput can make a fixed-cost FortiGate or BYOL Palo Alto more economical.
Ideal fit
Choose Cloud Firewall when your workloads live mostly in GCP and you need set-and-forget distribution without managing gateways. Pair it with Cloud Armor and Google’s zero-trust stack to create a mesh of protection that scales like the rest of Google’s infrastructure.
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series: enterprise-grade NGFW across every cloud
What it is and why it matters
Palo Alto’s VM-Series brings the same PAN-OS engine that secures thousands of data centers into AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other environments. You launch a marketplace image, attach Threat Prevention and URL Filtering licenses, and immediately gain App-ID, User-ID, machine-learning malware analysis, and the Wildfire sandbox in one virtual appliance.
Because the codebase matches Palo Alto hardware, security teams can reuse existing policies and push them through Panorama for true multi-cloud consistency. One console, one rule set, no need to re-map features between clouds. That familiarity shortens onboarding and cuts the risk of human error.
VM-Series turns your cloud edge into the same high-evasion barrier Fortune 500s trust on-prem, while adding the elasticity and infrastructure-as-code options of public cloud. When compliance, audit, or board-level risk tolerance requires the highest catch rate money can buy, VM-Series answers the call.
Where it shines
Security efficacy. Independent tests frequently place Palo Alto at the top of block-rate charts thanks to updated App-ID signatures, inline machine-learning models, and a cloud sandbox that detonates suspicious payloads before they reach production.
Policy portability. Write a rule once in Panorama (for example, “Deny outbound FTP except for the finance subnet”), and push it to AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-prem at the same time. Audit teams appreciate the uniform enforcement.
Automation. Terraform modules, CloudFormation templates, and a full REST API let DevOps bake firewall deployment into CI/CD pipelines. Need an autoscaling cluster during a traffic surge? A few lines of code add VM-Series nodes, inherit shared objects, and begin inspection within minutes.
These strengths make Palo Alto the preferred choice when top-tier threat coverage and multi-cloud consistency are mandatory.
Where it falls short
Performance comes at a price. Between the VM instance (often 8 or 16 vCPU), the base license, and add-on subscriptions, monthly spend can exceed that of a cloud-native firewall that charges pennies per gigabyte. For budget-sensitive teams, the sticker shock ends the conversation early.
Complexity follows cost. PAN-OS is deep and flexible, but new administrators face a steeper learning curve than they would in the Azure or AWS consoles. Features such as App-ID, dynamic address groups, and decryption policies pay dividends only after careful tuning; misconfiguration can block business traffic or leave gaps you thought were closed.
Scaling adds overhead. Palo Alto supplies autoscaling templates, yet you still maintain bootstrap scripts, state syncing, and license portability. By comparison, Google’s Plus tier simply adds capacity as demand grows.
Ideal fit
Choose VM-Series when your organization already has Palo Alto expertise, seeks the highest possible catch rate, and can justify the spend through reduced breach risk or compliance mandates. It excels in regulated workloads, shared services hubs, or any setting where auditors ask to see the strongest protection available.
Fortinet FortiGate VM: high-performance security at a cloud-friendly price
What it is and why it matters
FortiGate VM brings Fortinet’s hardware pedigree to virtual appliances that run in every major cloud. Even without custom ASICs, FortiOS delivers strong throughput on modest instance sizes, packing firewall, IPS, anti-malware, web filtering, and VPN into a single license.
Because the same OS powers branch devices, SD-WAN units, and data-center chassis, teams can reuse policies through FortiManager and analyze events in FortiAnalyzer. That consistency supports multi-site and multi-cloud rollouts without forcing staff to juggle multiple consoles.
In short, FortiGate provides a unified-threat-management stack in the cloud while often undercutting rivals on cost per protected gigabit.
Where it shines
- Compelling value. Real-world users frequently push 4–5 Gbps through a mid-tier instance that costs about half of a comparable Palo Alto or Premium Azure Firewall setup.
- Broad feature set. FortiOS includes IPS, application control, SSL VPN, and SD-WAN, letting smaller teams replace several point products with one policy framework.
- Flexible performance tuning. Switch inspection profiles from flow-based (fast path) to proxy-based (deep path) to balance security depth and CPU load.
- Integrated fabric. Fortinet’s Security Fabric merges telemetry from firewalls, switches, and endpoint agents into one dashboard, cutting investigation time for lean security teams.
Together these traits give FortiGate VM a strong security-to-spend ratio that appeals to both finance and network teams.
Where it falls short
You still own the plumbing. High availability depends on cloud load balancers, route tables, and failover scripts you maintain. Miss a step, and an instance reboot can drop traffic until health checks restore the path.
Some advanced features trail Palo Alto in granularity. Application control blocks thousands of apps, yet niche SaaS signatures or evasive protocols can slip through until FortiGuard releases an update.
Deep inspection taxes CPU quickly. When you enable full TLS decryption alongside multiple security profiles, that budget-friendly VM may slow, forcing a larger instance or an extra active-active node.
Ideal fit
FortiGate VM suits teams that need solid next-generation security, predictable spending, and the freedom to run the same firewall stack everywhere—from branch to data center to cloud—without stretching the budget or the learning curve.
Honorable mentions
A few strong contenders narrowly missed our top five. Check Point CloudGuard offers signature depth and close ties to the Infinity security platform. Cisco Secure Firewall Virtual—the ASA/FTD successor—fits organizations already running Cisco SD-WAN and Identity Services Engine. Cloudflare Magic Firewall and Zscaler Internet Access follow users rather than VPCs, delivering firewall-as-a-service wherever traffic originates.
Each product excels in a specific niche, whether that is deep threat intelligence, all-Cisco stacks, or user-centric SASE. We omitted them from the main list because most readers start by comparing cloud-native services and the two third-party heavyweights covered above. If your roadmap points toward SASE, or your data center already relies on Check Point appliances, keep these names on your short list.
Comparison summary: choosing the right firewall
At a basic level, all five options will block port scans and brute-force noise. The real differences appear in inspection depth, day-two operations, and long-run cost.
So which way should you lean?
If you live mainly in one cloud and value smooth operations, the native firewall is the quickest path to acceptable protection. Add strong threat feeds and you cover many workloads.
When risk tolerance is low, such as with healthcare records or payment data, third-party NGFWs earn their place. Palo Alto leads on efficacy, while Fortinet offers better value.
Many mature organizations blend both approaches: native firewalls for east-west traffic and cost control, a premium NGFW at the internet edge, and a SASE layer for roaming users. The mix can change over time, but the goal remains clear: block attackers and satisfy auditors without straining the budget.
Frequently asked questions
Can I protect non-AWS assets with AWS Network Firewall?
No. The service runs inside an AWS VPC and cannot inspect traffic in Azure, GCP, or on-prem networks. For multi-cloud coverage, pair it with a third-party NGFW or each cloud’s native firewall.
What’s the difference between Azure Network Security Groups and Azure Firewall?
Network Security Groups act like distributed ACLs at the subnet or NIC level and work well for basic port filtering. Azure Firewall is a centralized, stateful service that adds intrusion prevention, TLS inspection, and threat-intel blocking. Think of NSGs as guardrails and Azure Firewall as the guarded gatehouse.
Do cloud-native firewalls remove the need for third-party appliances?
Not always. Independent tests show native services can miss advanced threats. Many organizations place a Palo Alto or Fortinet VM at the edge for deeper inspection while relying on the cloud firewall for baseline controls and scaling.
How are these services billed?
Cloud-native options charge an hourly fee per endpoint plus a per-gigabyte processing fee. Third-party VMs require a software license (pay-as-you-go or BYOL) and the underlying VM cost, but traffic volume does not change the bill.
Will enabling TLS inspection slow my apps?
Yes. Decrypting and re-encrypting traffic adds CPU overhead and a few milliseconds of latency. Size your firewall instances accordingly or enable inspection only on high-risk segments.
Closing thoughts
Firewalls once guarded a single gateway. In the cloud, they appear as services, policies, and sometimes invisible fabric that follows every workload. The options we explored all cover the essentials, but the best fit depends on your primary cloud, risk tolerance, and team size.
Start with the native firewall for quick wins, add a third-party NGFW when compliance or advanced threats require deeper inspection, and review the mix each year because cloud security moves faster than budget cycles.
If you would like guidance on architecture or licensing, our TD SYNNEX cybersecurity specialists are ready to help match protection to your goals and keep attackers out.
