Azure Application Gateway vs. SonicWall Web Application Firewall

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

I will recommend SonicWall depending of the size of the company and the knowledge of the personal is going to administer the firewall. I deploy those in small office settings where manageability was relative non existence.

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

• Content updates are automatic content lists of applications, URLs, virtual threats.
• Great visualization through graphics of traffic and threats.
• One of the best web content filters on the market.

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

• VPN implementation
• Geo block rules

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

Technical support is a little expensive but it works. Any technical problem or not, SonicWall support helps in solving the problems. The SLA is fast and the service is also cordial, functional, and straight to the point. Support is essential to keep the tool always up-to-date with lists of malware, URLs, attacks, and others.

Incentivized

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

Both products has their pro and cons. However in term of subscription and pricing for a small office, this offered better ROI as the office didn't want to spend too much and have something relative easy to manage.

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

• More accurate analysis with the best usage reports and graphs
• Reduction of virtual attacks from blocks

Incentivized