Azure DDoS Protection vs DDoS-GUARD Comparison: Everything You Need to Know Before Choosing

Azure DDoS Protection is Microsoft’s service for defending applications hosted on Azure against distributed denial-of-service attacks. DDoS attacks attempt to overwhelm networks and services with malicious traffic, causing outages, degraded performance and financial loss, and they have grown in scale and sophistication. All Azure resources benefit from infrastructure-level protection built into the platform at no additional cost, but this baseline defends Microsoft’s infrastructure as a whole rather than being tuned to an individual customer’s applications. Azure DDoS Protection adds dedicated, adaptive protection for customers’ virtual networks and public IP addresses. Its core approach is to learn normal traffic patterns for each protected resource and apply mitigation policies automatically when anomalies are detected, scrubbing attack traffic at the edge of Microsoft’s global network while legitimate traffic continues to reach the application. This is particularly important for organisations whose revenue or public services depend on continuous online availability and which cannot tolerate prolonged outages caused by hostile traffic. The service is offered as Network Protection, which covers all public IP resources within protected virtual networks, and IP Protection, which applies to individual public IP addresses. Capabilities include always-on traffic monitoring, adaptive tuning, protection against volumetric, protocol and certain resource-layer attacks, and integration with Azure Web Application Firewall for application-layer threats. Telemetry, metrics, alerts and mitigation reports are available through Azure Monitor and Microsoft Sentinel, and Network Protection customers gain access to the DDoS Rapid Response team during active attacks, cost protection credits for scale-out resources, and discounts on Web Application Firewall. Configuration is managed through the Azure portal, CLI, PowerShell and infrastructure-as-code templates. It is aimed at organisations running internet-facing workloads on Azure, including e-commerce, financial services, gaming, media and public sector bodies. Pricing starts from around USD 2,944 per month for Network Protection; there is no free trial or free version of the enhanced tier.