The cloud-native firewalls and NAT gateways — AWS Network Firewall, Azure Firewall, AWS and Azure NAT gateways — are convenient and well integrated. They also share two problems that get worse as you grow: the way they bill, and the fact that you manage a different one in every cloud.
The cost problem
Every one of these services charges on the same shape: a base charge plus a per-GB data-processing fee on the traffic it handles.
- AWS Network Firewall charges per firewall endpoint per hour — multiplied per availability zone — plus a per-GB data-processing fee.
- Azure Firewall charges an hourly deployment fee plus a per-GB data-processing fee.
- NAT gateways add their own hourly charge and their own per-GB data-processing fee on top.
The base charges are predictable. The per-GB lines are not — they scale directly with how much your workloads talk, and they apply whether or not the firewall did anything useful with the packet. This is the wedge: the metered model means your security bill grows with your business, indefinitely, with no relationship to the value delivered. For the detail on each, see Understanding AWS Network Firewall and Reducing Cloud NAT Costs.
The operational problem
The cloud-native services are single-cloud by design. Run AWS and Azure and you operate two separate firewalls, with two different sets of concepts, two consoles, two rule formats, and two bills. Every cloud you add is another tool to learn and another place policy can drift out of alignment.
Enforza’s approach
Enforza replaces the cloud-native firewall and NAT gateway with one firewall instance that delivers the same core capabilities — stateful inspection, traffic filtering, secure NAT, identity-aware hostname (SNI/FQDN) rules — and more, while removing both problems:
| Cloud-native firewall + NAT | Enforza | |
|---|---|---|
| Base charge | Hourly, often per-AZ | Flat per firewall |
| Data-processing fee | Per GB, scales with traffic | None |
| Multi-cloud | One service per cloud | One console across clouds |
| Operations | Provider-specific concepts | One consistent model |
- No per-GB data-processing tax. Flat per-firewall licensing — typically 60–80% less than the cloud-native firewall plus its data-processing charges.
- No instance-size, IP, or device limits. Run it on any VM size; the price does not change with vCPUs, protected IPs, or hosts.
- One pane of glass across clouds. Consistent policy and terminology on AWS, Azure and GCP, instead of a different service per provider.
- Comparable capability, lower cost. You are not trading away security to drop the bill — Enforza covers the ~98% most teams actually use.
Enforza is the way to replace your cloud-native firewall on cost without going full-blown enterprise security vendor: more than the CSP service, far less than — and far cheaper than — a six-figure mega-NGFW platform. Compare the numbers on the pricing page or the AWS Network Firewall comparison.
