Ammar Hasayen, a Microsoft MVP and blogger, explains why this is important:Ī malicious user can use port scanning to discover this public IP and use brute force attack to compromise your jumpbox.Īnother capability included in Azure Bastion is virtual machine hardening which protects against zero-day exploits. This is another scenario that is covered by Azure Bastion. No public IP address required on Azure Virtual Machinesįor organizations which may have their existing jumpbox(es) exposed over the internet, their machines may be subject to port scans by malicious users.Remote session over SSL and firewall traversal for RDP/SSH.The core capabilities in Azure Bastion include: During the preview of Azure Bastion, they were able to use RDP/SSH over SSL to our virtual machines which allowed them to traverse corporate firewalls effortlessly and at the same time, restrict Azure Virtual Machines to only private IPs. Microsoft already has organizations from these industry segments previewing this technology, Khalidi explains:Ī German premium car manufacturer had concerns about exposing cloud virtual machines with RDP/SSH ports directly to the Internet due to the potential of experiencing a number of security and connectivity issues. Secure remote connectivity is important for manufacturing and asset-intensive industries where servers need to be segregated across lower-level networks. This can be executed with just two clicks and without the need to worry about managing network security policies. Azure Bastion provisions directly in your Azure Virtual Network, providing a bastion host or jumpbox server as-a-service and integrated connectivity to all virtual machines in your virtual networking using RDP/SSH directly from and through your browser and the Azure portal experience. This is completed without any exposure of the public IPs on your virtual machines. Yousef Khalidi, corporate vice president of Azure Networking, explains how Azure Bastion addresses remote connectivity challenges:Īzure Bastion is a new managed PaaS service that provides seamless RDP and SSH connectivity to your virtual machines over the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Organizations either need to reduce security measures or force users to create multiple remote connections as they traverse multi-level networks.

The platform as a service (PaaS) extends virtual machine connectivity using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Secure Shell (SSH) inside a modern web browser.Įnterprise organizations encounter competing forces when it comes to providing remote connectivity and a good experience to their users.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced the preview of a secure remote desktop solution, called Azure Bastion, which does not require organizations to expose virtual machines using public IP Addresses.

Azure bastion rdp