Azure Application Gateway vs. Cloudflare Zero Trust Services

For building scalable and highly available applications, Azure Application Gateway does most of the job on behalf of you; automatically load-balancing traffic from a number of users to a number of back-end servers. This ensure scalability and availability. The in-built security is great as can be expected from Microsoft, and user has a variety of tools for monitoring the health of the load-balancing function as well as the health of back end servers behind it.

Incentivized

For example, Cloudflare is a very good solution for ZTNA implementation. Cloudflare has Warp for propagating Gateway rules and checking device posture. Browser Isolation gives you more abilities to use internet resources without any restrictions and at the same time not put the company at risk. For example, if there is no DLP solution in place blocking the printing function can partly protect the company's sensitive data from intentional or intentional leakage through the online forms. A similar approach protects the end-user device from Zero-day threats and malicious software code. Moreover, Remote Browser Isolation technology protects not only the user's device but also the user himself from possible phishing attacks - for example, even if the user enters his username and password on the phishing website, bank card issuers, or other personal or confidential data, data will not go beyond the isolated cloud environment. Cloudflare Access gives company administrators a great opportunity to implement role-based access policies and make effect segmentation and diversification of company network groups.

Incentivized

• Easy integration with Load Balancer and Azure Scale Set to provide a full solution for traffic management.
• With rich routing rule, we could use one Application Gateway as the central point for all internal applications to expose to the external network.

Incentivized

• Block access to known bad, risky, or unwanted destinations at the DNS or HTTP level.
• Excellent protection for remote users.
• Best in class browser isolation techniques.

Incentivized

• Live examples in the Azure documentation
• Application Gateway UI Blade in Azure Portal can be streamlined
• Have more advanced feature set as WAF (Web Application Firewall)

Incentivized

• Very API [oriented] which is fine, but the GUI is sometimes inconsistent

Incentivized

I don’t like that it's part of the Microsoft brand. In general, I am not a fan of Microsoft products but Azure gets it right.

Incentivized

Good chat support from the portal for basic questions and minor issues. The enterprise support line is provided as well.

Other load balancing tools in Azure (Azure LB and Azure Traffic Manager) are limited in their functionality in comparison with the Azure Application Gateway, and also, they don't provide security features. Azure Firewall, although it has security features, is more expensive, and most importantly, it's not a load balancer at all.

Incentivized

As long as all Cloudflare products and services rely on anycast technology, in a complex approach Cloudflare is faster and more relevant for cloud applications. The balance between security and performance is fully established. Also, Cloudflare has quite a good stack for API connection protection, like the API Shield example, which makes it more effective compared to F5 for example. Warp as a ZTNA agent gives better visibility and device posture information than FortiClient does.

Incentivized

• Costs increased for the company, so expenses were more than before.
• Was able to get better user experience so users won't feel the website is useless.

Incentivized

• Complete solution in case of using with Cloudflare Access.
• No need of maintenance.
• No skilled staff and trainings required.

Incentivized