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Microsoft has just released a preview of a new service for Azure called Bastion, a new way to connect to Azure virtual machines that is not only easier, but more secure. Currently, connecting to virtual machines has meant traversing corporate firewalls, opening ports, and/or assigning IP addresses, but Bastion provides users of the Azure Portal a quick, easy, and secure connection to all VMs in a resource using RDP/SSH over SSL. Here are some of the key features, as noted in the Azure blog post announcing the new service:
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- RDP and SSH from the Azure portal: Initiate RDP and SSH sessions directly in the Azure portal with a single-click seamless experience.
- Remote session over SSL and firewall traversal for RDP/SSH: HTML5 based web clients are automatically streamed to your local device providing the RDP/SSH session over SSL on port 443. This allows easy and securely traversal of corporate firewalls.
- No public IP required on Azure Virtual Machines: Azure Bastion opens the RDP/SSH connection to your Azure virtual machine using a private IP, limiting exposure of your infrastructure to the public Internet.
- Simplified secure rules management: Simple one-time configuration of Network Security Groups (NSGs) to allow RDP/SSH from only Azure Bastion.
- Increased protection against port scanning: The limited exposure of virtual machines to the public Internet will help protect against threats, such as external port scanning.
- Hardening in one place to protect against zero-day exploits: Azure Bastion is a managed service maintained by Microsoft. It’s continuously hardened by automatically patching and keeping up to date against known vulnerabilities.
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As you may know, we’re running OnMSFT.com on an Azure VM, and while we don’t often need to connect directly to the installation, having a ready to use connection that’s more secure sounds like an all around win-win. You can read more about Bastion on the services Azure web page. Pricing for the service is free for the first 5GB of use, and starts at 12.2¢ per hour after that, with a 50% discount during the preview.
