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Microsoft recently released the public preview of Azure Firewall Basic for small-medium businesses (SMBs), providing enterprise-grade security at an affordable price. The company offers the Basic SKU as it sees SMBs as particularly vulnerable to budget constraints and gaps in specialized security skills.

Azure Firewall Basic is a new SKU of Azure Firewall, a cloud-native and intelligent network firewall security service – already offering a standard and premium SKU (previewed last year and generally available later in July). The new basic SKU includes Layer 3–Layer 7 filtering and alerts on malicious traffic with built-in threat intelligence from Microsoft Threat Intelligence. Furthermore, it has tight integration with other Azure services, such as Azure Monitor, Azure Events Hub, Microsoft Sentinel, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud. 

 
Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/firewall/overview

With the basic SKU, Azure Firewall offers three SKUs for different use cases and needs of customers. Premium is suitable for organizations needing to secure highly sensitive applications (such as payment processing), with scalability needs of up to 100 Gbps. The standard SKU is for organizations requiring automatic scaling for peak traffic periods of up to 30 Gbps, and finally, basic for SMBs with throughput needs of less than 250 Mbps. 

Dean Cefola explains in an Azure Academy video:

Basic is also built upon a VM Scale set, so it is highly available, but to control the cost, the SKU is limited to only two virtual machines under the hood.

Furthermore, note that the basic lacks the Premium edition’s “advanced threat protection capabilities,” which include threat-intelligence filtering, inbound and outbound TLS termination, a fully-managed intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS), and URL filtering. 

Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-firewall-basic-now-in-preview/

Azure MVP Aidin Finn concluded in his recent blog post on Azure Basic Firewall:

The new SKU of Azure Firewall should add new customers to this service. I also expect that larger enterprises will also be interested – not every deployment needs the full-blown Standard/Premium deployment, but some form of firewall is still required.

In addition, Alan Kilane, an Azure technical lead at MicroWarehouse, tweeted:

I’ve been waiting on the release of this new Azure Firewall Basic SKU for a while.  Badly needed for the SMB space; it will be interesting to see the uptake on this.

Lastly, more details on Azure Firewall are available on the documentation landing page. Furthermore, Azure Firewall Basic pricing, like the Standard and Premium SKUs, includes both deployment and data processing charges. More details on pricing are available on the pricing page.