Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP Reviews

CloudGuard is a tool for evaluating the health and configuration of an account. We primarily use it for AWS, but we also use it for Azure. I also use it for inventory and historical reporting.

We work with 50 AWS accounts. Four teams across a couple of time zones use CloudGuard. Our security and DevOps teams are the primary users, but the support team occasionally uses it. Management consumes the output and the reports. I think it makes them feel good, so that's nice. 

I recently transitioned into a management and architecture role. CloudGuard helped me delegate to my engineers the day-to-day tasks of operational care and feeding and health assessments of the environments. I previously spent more time building rules and implementing automatic remediations. Now, I let it fly, and my engineers operate it. 

I helped with the design and build, and I was originally in charge of the run. I've now handed off the run, which enabled me to do more. I think it helped those guys to be effective and do more. I'd say it freed up the equivalent of a quarter to an eighth of an FTE.

CloudGuard allows us to scale. As we bring on customers, more accounts come online, and more platforms are deployed in our environment, I don't have to scale my team linearly with the growth of our product. These rules work over and over on the number of accounts. I think that's a place where it will help us as our customer base grows.

The security operations team saved some time. I'm on the team, so I do a lot with this. It's one of the essential tools. Depending on the incident, Check Point can be extremely helpful in understanding the configuration. I use it ad hoc or tactically in those conditions. At the same time, other operations or security incidents are out of view of Check Point and Dome9, so it doesn't come into play. When the problem is at the account or configuration level, it makes remediation and troubleshooting an investigation easier.

It saves time because I can look across the organization. Instead of checking 50 different accounts atomically and spending 15 minutes investigating each, I can spend 15 minutes exploring all 50 accounts. It allows me to quickly look across the org for similar problems when one comes up. That's a huge time saver. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to create a reference rule set and use that to evaluate an account's health. It provides daily reports on any drift from that rule set and real-time alerts. Some of the automated remediations are also helpful.

I like the GSL Builder, which helped us reduce human error. It helps answer a question quickly in real-time that I might not want to put into a specific rule that I evaluate across all my accounts all the time. In many cases, we've built rules that we consider everywhere for the posture of all our essential accounts. However, I often work on an issue or question, and I just want to see who has this configuration or misconfiguration. GSL Builder lets me quickly locate all the S3 buckets with a faulty configuration. I use it tactically like that sometimes.

I'd be sad if it went away. However, you couldn't throw an inexperienced person at it and expect them to get any value from it without some handholding or spending time to read the documentation and think about it. You must know about the asset you interrogate to write a good rule or to do a good evaluation. That isn't a Check Point problem, but it's a general issue in cloud security. 

CloudGuard offers several pre-packaged rules for various evaluations, such as NIST, 853, etc. I went through them, found 50 rules I think are handy, and put them into a custom rule set. Then, I spent time writing about 30 rules specific to my environment. I use those to evaluate the health of my accounts continuously. 

We check health insurer information because all this data is highly confidential and protected by HIPAA. We use these rules to evaluate our cloud properties constantly. I can't imagine the time that would take to perform this kind of evaluation by hand or using another tool. That's why we have Check Point.

There are many auto-remediations available. We use a few and wrote a couple of our own. It's an excellent risk management tool. We use it because we're so paranoid about the security of our environment. I've used this tool at other companies in different industries, and they've been apprehensive about automatic remediation. It depends on the part of the world you live in. I use it, and it stopped problems, so I've gotten tremendous value from auto-remediation.

The ability to prioritize alerts has been handy. It enables me to focus on critical issues instead of common misconfiguration. The visibility into my workloads is pretty good but not great. I don't use it at a granular level. I'm primarily focused on protecting my overall cloud posture and the health of the account with CloudGuard, but I also look for some common misconfigurations that might be workload-induced.

Making basic rules is easy, but it's complex if you want to do something a little more nuanced. I've been unable to make some rules that I wanted. I couldn't evaluate some values or parameters of the components I look for. I haven't always been able to assess them.

It feels like some attributes of resources can't be interrogated through the GSL the way I would like. For example, I wanted to figure out all the systems launched with a particular image that had been running for 31 days or more. Until I talked to the Dome9 people and the support team, I didn't understand how to frame that query in GSL. The support team told me how to do it, but I couldn't figure it out alone. The documentation is a little unclear about how to do some of those configurations. More tutorials and examples on the blogs and support pages would be helpful. 

I had another problem when we tried to encrypt all of our storage volumes. There is a feature called batch jobs or Elastic MapReduce jobs. CloudGuard sometimes can't detect the encryption status of the underlying disks of those systems that process my workloads. It pops up with a bunch of alerts that say, "Non-encrypted volumes have been found in your account." 

Those jobs are dynamic, so they spin up, run for an hour or two, and all the systems are destroyed. By the time I checked it, all the systems were gone. CloudGuard threw a bunch of alerts in the middle of the night when all these things happened, and I went back to evaluate the configuration. I know they were all encrypted because I can see how it was deployed. It didn't have a great insight into my actual workload, but it generally tells me when people launch unencrypted things. It isn't perfect, but it's okay.

I have used CloudGuard for four years.

CloudGuard has been solidly stable. I'd say nearly perfect.

CloudGuard's scalability is decent. They're switching to a new onboarding methodology that I'm not in love with, but I think we'll find a way to make it work and continue to scale. It has been good.

I rate Check Point's support an eight out of ten. I've contacted them with a few questions or issues and always had good support experiences with them. I'm not a huge customer paying millions of dollars a year. I work for a small startup on the bleeding edge of technology, and I feel like Check Point and Dome9 meet me where I am. 

It wasn't trying to shove a network firewall, like a data center security tool, down my throat. Palo Alto and Check Point are old-school network security appliance vendors that are out of their depth in cloud security, so they bought tools like bought Twistlock and Dome9. Check Point's acquisition and management of Dome9 have been excellent. I can still talk to people at Dome9 and get support for this tooling, but it has been difficult for me to do that with their competitors. 

Positive

I've used Palo Alto Prisma Cloud, but I've also used Palo Alto's Cloud Security Posture Management tooling. I prefer Check Point, which is why we have it.

I still have both solutions, but I use Palo Alto for something else. I use Twistlock, a Prisma Cloud module, for runtime protection of containerized workloads. I also use Dome9 for CSPM. I did not like using Prisma Cloud for CSPM because I did not care for the rule language or configuration. 

Also, I feel like Check Point, and Dome9 listen to their users. If I'm dying for a new feature to improve the solution, they would hear me out and consider it. I guarantee you that Palo Alto doesn't care.

Deploying CloudGuard is straightforward. I deployed it and configured the auto-remediation alone, but I also worked with another architect to discuss the design and workshop some ideas, so we could say a team of two deployed it.
After deployment, maintenance has been very low.

We've seen a return. It still makes sense to write a check. I can't imagine going back to doing it the way I did before. It's essential for my compliance program to have this tool in place. If I could save the $100,000 or more I pay annually and use cloud-native tools, the additional time I would spend tuning and doing everything I'm doing with CloudGuard wouldn't be worth it, at least not in the first year. 

CloudGuard is fairly priced.

I rate Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management an eight out of ten. I advise new users to start with a defined list of goals or problems and implement the solution in a way that initially prioritizes their most significant issues or primary goals. Don't try to boil the ocean. In other words, don't enable all the features and do everything at once. They will be overloaded unless they know what they're doing. Go feature by feature, function by function, and area by area. Determine where your critical risks are and implement the solution based on that knowledge.

I think there are some benefits to using a third-party tool. For example, these tools might simplify and enrich features or offer focus. You're adding another view or pane of glass to your security world, but once you start to look across clouds, it becomes interesting. I have to write all my own rules for Azure and AWS. At the same time, I can get the same report delivered to my inbox that I can then feed to my executives, showing them the health of these cloud properties. 

It looks cohesive and coherent instead of using separate native tools for AWS, GCP, Alibaba, and Azure and trying to compile all those reports and metrics. At least I can distill my posture into a commonsense readable score and transmit that to the executives. I can tell them, "Our posture's at 98% compliance." They can comprehend that and compare the scores from week to week. It helps me from a reporting angle.

We use Check Point CloudGuard for full visibility across our workloads in the cloud and on-premises.

The GSL builder's graphical interface makes writing custom rules and policies easy, but some knowledge and training are still required. The training required takes around two weeks to complete.

The GSL builder helps reduce human errors by almost 80 percent because it provides compliance rules and performs intelligence queries on our behalf.

The GSL builder saves us time creating custom rules. Initially, defining the rules takes time, but once that is downloaded, it becomes an automated process. We save around ten hours per week.

Our organization requires the use of Check Point's auto-remediation feature. This feature automatically analyzes and remediates threats, enabling us to perform forensic analysis on detected events. By implementing this feature, we benefit from several detection capabilities, including anti-ransomware and behavioral analysis, which ensure comprehensive threat detection and analysis. Additionally, the auto-remediation feature automatically quarantines and remediates malicious files, preventing data breaches. As a result, we can leverage the forensic report to enhance our endpoint security posture and effectively protect our internet connectivity.

The auto-remediation feature stands out for its ability to prioritize alerts. It focuses on high-risk issues first and then remediates them accordingly.

The unified security management console, a component of the monitoring tool, offers a comprehensive overview of our platform's security posture. This holistic view enables us to promptly identify emerging environmental threats and conduct thorough investigations, ensuring swift and effective responses.

The evaluation of the application depends on its criticality. For example, in an airport scenario, an AODV application is used for critical operations. This means that the AODV application is of high importance and requires a more thorough investigation or a faster response in case of issues.

Check Point CloudGuard has significantly improved my cloud threat handling. It has been a great asset in increasing my security posture score due to its automated remediation capabilities. Additionally, its threat intelligence provides valuable insights, making it a comprehensive security solution. Furthermore, CloudGuard offers comprehensive lifecycle security for all my applications, including new deployments. It also addresses complex security needs within my cloud environment, ensuring compliance with all relevant regulations and governance requirements.

CloudGuard provides good performance for automating our organization's security across assets, workloads, and multiple clouds.

The agentless workload posture plays a crucial role in determining our organization's security posture. This includes security and posture management, threat prevention, and high-availability posture management. All these aspects are highly important, and they also help automate my DevOps multi-cloud security threat level.

Network security helps us reduce the amount of compliance and audit activities we need to perform. It provides advanced threat protection, allowing us to inspect all traffic entering and leaving our private subnets within our entire virtual network. This comprehensive approach ensures robust network security and ongoing time savings.

CloudGuard can help free up around six hours of our staff time because it can be integrated with different applications and systems. 

CloudGuard's unified platform can free up an average of six hours per day, a feat impossible for any human worker. However, the system's automated configurations can function around the clock, achieving this level of efficiency.

The most valuable features are the ability to create pipeline rules, the enhanced NetOps security, and the deep visibility across our entire infrastructure. 

Check Point CloudGuard also helps us adhere to the compliance and regulatory requirements, I can ensure best practices are implemented, prioritize risk management, and prevent critical attacks.

Automation and advanced threat prevention have room for improvement. I would like the rules configuration which are manually reviewed to be automated according to the defined rules.

I have been using Check Point CloudGuard for two years.

Check Point CloudGuard is stable.

Check Point CloudGuard is scalable.

The technical support is good.

Positive

The initial deployment required knowledgeable people. We had already planned the required configuration type, the necessary posture management approach, and the rules that needed to be defined. We had discussed these requirements with the CloudGuard team member and implemented them together. Four people were involved in the deployment.

A person from CloudGuard helped with the implementation.

We have the enterprise-level license and we renew it annually because it is worth the cost.

I would rate Check Point CloudGuard an eight out of ten.

Check Point offers a bundled solution that includes cloud threat hunting, cloud migration security, DevSecOps, and cloud security compliance. This comprehensive package is a superior choice as it provides a unified approach to cloud security.

We have Check Point CloudGuard deployed in one location with 400 users.

A team of four admins performs maintenance on CloudGuard every quarter.

CloudGuard boasts advanced threat prevention for network security, seamlessly securing public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. It also provides unified security management and simplifies complaint handling.

We have our CSPM and CNAPP services powered by CloudGuard. Those are the two that we are doing direct services for today, but as a reseller, we offer all the pillars.

We are a value-added reseller. We are not necessarily using it as our own. We are not a dev shop, but those are the use cases. If one of our customers has a dev shop and is working out of the cloud, this is where they look to get some better understanding and control over what their development team or their DevOps team is doing and building. This is where CloudGuard CNAPP comes into play.

CloudGuard CNAPP definitely helps with bringing the controls, which can then play to compliance. We have a few key customers in the utility space, so compliance is a major driver. Being able to apply required controls through CNAPP helps and benefits them.

Security is not a No, where you have to say, "No. You cannot do it." By having the CNAPP toolset for the DevOps team, you enable them to do their work, and it is securely done.

We use CloudGuard CNAPP's Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) capabilities. We have been using CSPM for just over a year. We use it internally for our own IT security. We are a company with about 75 people, and our IT security uses CSPM actively not just to respond in time but also to help manage and keep an eye on all the controls and things.

Cloud Security Posture Management identifies the risks that are most critical to our business. It helps us to prioritize those. 

We do not use CloudGuard CNAPP's CloudGuard Workload Protection capabilities. We do not have a development shop. That is where the workloads come into play, but absolutely, that is where our customers could get some of the value to be able to keep their automations and speed going by having those workload protections in place. 

It is able to bring visibility into that cloudy space where the security departments do not really see what is happening on the DevOps side. It brings visibility, security control, and standardization. These are some key features.

I am not a technical person, but generically, the user interface can be a little more intuitive. Our staff has trained network security and cloud security professionals, and they get it, but when you are trying to get to the customers to be able to pick it up and maintain it, it can be a bit difficult, so the user interface can be a little better.

We have been using CloudGuard CNAPP for just about a year.

It is a Check Point product. It is not going anywhere. We have known CSPM for years, and it has only got improved every step of the way. Our impression is that CNAPP and the other pillars will do the same. They will continue to be steady and sturdy.

Their top-end technical support is excellent. Like anything else, it is hard to get to TAC, but we are an elite partner, so we have great channel support and strategic support. We have good experience with tech support.

We have not used any other solution. We have been a Check Point customer for a long time. When it started to come out, we started to take it on.

We are primarily on Azure, but our customers are in AWS and Azure. We do not have a lot of work with Google Cloud. We have a little bit of Oracle cloud, but AWS and Azure are the two big players we see our customers using.

I am not involved in its deployment, but I know that for CSPM, which is probably related, you discover as you go. You deploy it, and you are able to get the overall insights into what the environment is. I presume you would lead with that and then work on the workload and CNAPP, but I have not had to do it myself.

We have seen an ROI, but I do not have statistics to back it. Even for our small internal IT, it helps with efficiency and reduces the time in having to go through and try to find all the misconfigurations and other things. That time is money, and that is the return on the investment, for sure. I presume our customers feel the same way when they are using and deploying, especially things related to CNAPP. Once deployed and in action, they save a lot of time because one hour of prework saves ten hours as a rework, and that is what we get with CloudGuard CNAPP.

We evaluated Orca and Wiz. We are a value-added reseller, so we do sell them. Wiz has a lot of good and competitive aspects to CloudGuard features, but CloudGuard is very competitive with them, and we are deep partners, so we lean towards that.

To those considering this solution, I would say that it is pretty easy to get it started and get the evaluation going. Check Point has a whole cloud team that is there not to sell you anything but to help find where you are in the cloud journey and bring evaluation and other things forward.

CloudGuard CNAPP is definitely in the upper echelon. I would rate it a nine out of ten. It competes very well with other solutions such as Wiz. If you break it down, it competes very well with them. That puts it right up there at the top.

We use CloudGuard to monitor the cloud IaaS, AWS, and Azure security postures, including cloud assets' configurations. Based on the framework in the rulesets, it will give us failing, passing, or partially compliant scores. It allows us to implement auto-remediation and guardrails. 

If a user exposes storage on the public internet accidentally or purposefully, a daily report is sent to the account owner. CloudGuard will automatically fix the issue if auto-remediation is appropriate. We have GCP, AWS, and Azure accounts. CloudGuard is a SaaS solution, and we onboard all our AWS accounts, whether public, private, or hybrid.

In our sandbox environment, auto-remediation kicks in, and everything is fixed. Users try to do it themselves but often don't know how because they're not trained to provide cloud support. We don't currently use complete remediation, which will break their production environment, but we're getting better by nagging the cloud account users. Our cybersecurity team can use the shared response score to encourage cloud account owners to fix the problem.

CloudGuard has specific instructions for how users should fix issues, but it's like pulling teeth sometimes. Users often don't respond, and we get to the point where we need to tell them that it's going through change management and we can't renew it. We will auto-remediate in production environments if they don't respond by that date. 

It helped some cloud deployment users understand how to improve security posture, but not all of them. It depends on whether they are reading the CloudGuard reports daily. Many don't want to manage that part, and we believe our cybersecurity will help fix that for them.

We automated account onboarding. When a user wants a new cloud account, the automation scripts kick in after the request is approved to create the cloud account. After the provisioning is completed, the account is onboarded into CloudGuard. It enables us to have full coverage because CloudGuard monitors all our organization's cloud accounts.

I wouldn't say that CloudGuard has freed up staff for other projects. I have two or three dedicated SecOps people to monitor and follow up with remediation when auto-remediation isn't possible. We also deal with CloudGuard account requests and just-in-time user account access. It's difficult to assign a specific user to view the cloud accounts only they can see. 

I'm an SME for the product and train people annually because SecOps folks come and go. So far, we have had this software for three years. A lot of other organizations will switch solutions after two or three years. Training is essential because it's a high learning curve for people unfamiliar with the cloud. I don't think CloudGuard has made it more accessible. While it has decreased the resources, we still need at least one full-time admin dealing with CloudGuard, especially with the bugs.

We saved some time. We always go for a Unified Enterprise Platform. In terms of Cloud Security Posture Management, we wanted an enterprise solution with GCP, AWS, and Azure support, so we chose CloudGuard.

The posture management and remediation features are the most valuable. We use GSL Builder to build custom rules in alignment with our organization's policies. CloudGuard has canned rules using multiple standard frameworks, but we also have additional rules. Building custom rules with GSL Builder is medium difficulty. They have several examples of other compliance rules you can use. The GSL documentation is decent. A non-technical person can learn to use GSL Builder in about a week. GSL Builder saved us time and reduced human error. 

The auto-remediation works when it works. It does its job and is based on the rule instead of the alert's severity. In our company, we say, "Okay, this rule is a high severity. We don't want the data to be exposed on the internet." For example, if someone puts a public IP on our database, we will set a rule to shut it down immediately. That's how we define remediation. 

It isn't based on the severity or the level of work. Some rules may be defined as lower severity by default, but they might be higher depending on the organization's policy. It kicks in when there's an alert matching the remediation rule. The effectiveness of the remediation is 50%. Some of their bots used to fix issues automatically need to be updated. We had to make a few custom changes to some bots because they don't wake up.

CloudGuard's effective risk management only scans accounts every hour. We have more than 150 AWS accounts and 20 Azure accounts. We sent Check Point a request asking them to increase the frequency to five to fifteen minutes. I want the flexibility to scan it as often as possible based on the account's importance. That part is lacking. 

When rules change, it messes up the remediation. They haven't found a fix for that yet. The remediation rule goes into limbo. It's an architectural design flaw within their end compliance engine—a serious bug. We must spend extra time reapplying the rule when they periodically update the compliance presets. Auto-remediation breaks if you're using that particular out-of-the-box rule. I haven't experienced this recently, so maybe they fixed that part. However, that's what it did in the past.

Check Point is slow to respond to bugs. They resolve bugs maybe once every two weeks, and their R&D is slow. They're in Israel, and it's not just the Israeli holidays. I would probably pick a large US company if we did this over again. 

They don't give us continuous feedback. I want live feedback when they change something. Stop breaking things. The company should let us know what they're doing when they add new features. They don't have an official beta program, so you can't test the new features. 

That's the other bad thing about this product, but I don't know about other Check Point products. They're a firewall company but not a software company. If you put out a beta, customers should have the option to test it and give feedback. I've been putting a lot of work into CloudGuard to fix all the bugs. They should have paid me to fix their bugs for them.

They need to decrease their bug resolution time. Anything longer than two weeks is problematic. It's why we don't jump into the deep end with all these other features they've added. Our primary feature is the CSPM cloud part. The solution is useless if the reporting or remediation breaks, as it has in the past. It requires an SME for CloudGuard to dig in deeper, which takes time away from our SecOps folks.

We've been using CloudGuard for three years.

CloudGuard is pretty stable.

CloudGuard is scalable. I don't need to worry about it.

I rate Check Point's support a seven out of ten. They respond within a day. 

Neutral

Setting up CloudGuard is straightforward, and it takes a few days. We handled the deployment in-house with two full-time employees. It's a SaaS solution, so the only maintenance required is backups. 

We implemented this solution in-house.

The pricing of CloudGuard increases annually, and we don't see the value because we don't use all the features. We're primarily using CSPM and maybe Workload Protection. We did the Kubernetes part and used Network Explorer as a one-off. We only used Network Explorer for diagnostics. 

We use the Intelligence module for CSPM but don't analyze network traffic with CloudGuard. It's an expensive subscription, so we don't use the intelligence part.

We evaluated Palo Alto Prisma Cloud and Twistlock. Back then, the solution was owned by an independent company called Dome9, and Check Point acquired them. It had the best rule set out there. We chose it because it had all the rule sets out of the box and supported GCP, Azure, and AWS. 

I rate Check Point CloudGard Posture Management a seven out of ten. CloudGuard does its job, but the remediation is not perfect. Other CSPM tools do a better job of using remediation exclusion rules, especially scanning and putting out reports at a custom frequency versus every hour.

If the price isn't an issue and you don't care about using all the features, it's an okay product for enterprises to use to cover all cloud IaaS. If you're thinking about implementing CloudGuard, you should consider two things. First, the price is marked up every year by 10-plus percent, whether you use a particular feature or not. It's an annual subscription model, so you can always cancel at any time. 

Second, you should think about the modules. Workload Protection is okay if you use Kubernetes. You can use intelligence if you need to analyze traffic within your cloud environment for regulation-specific reasons, but it will cost you extra. CloudGuard's strong suit is that they support a lot of the features and AWS cloud assets.

We are a VAR. We use posture management in various client environments for different assessments. 

We do not use it internally. We use it in multiple client environments. We have different types of client environments with different sizes.

It is great for identifying misconfigurations. That is the part that I love about it.  It is very good at finding that needle in the haystack. It gives you an overall posture for every little thing, and if you dive into it and look at some of the findings, you start seeing that you have one or two servers that are misconfigured, and you have an open BLOB, open storage instance, unsecured web portal, or something else that you did not know about. 

The effectiveness of its Cloud Security Posture Management for providing compliance rulesets and security best practices is great.

Its Cloud Security Posture Management helps identify the risks that are most critical to our clients relatively quickly. I cannot put a number on that, but not having to go through every little configuration on every asset would probably save a week's worth of effort for the smallest client. 

Its traffic monitoring capabilities are good. Helps visualize traffic flows and possibly exposed assets.

The actual setup is pretty manual. It takes about an hour or two, depending on the client you are working with.

The rulesets and the findings are valuable. The actual core functionality of it and the efficacy of events are great. There is some triaging, but in terms of findings, it does seem to find the needle in the haystack.

The dashboards specifically are great. By just logging in and going into the portal, we can see the high-level dashboard views. We are able to dive into whatever we want to see there, and that is fantastic.

The network mapping and the traffic flow map, where it shows you which VMs might be possibly exposed, are also very valuable. It shows which systems might have direct access to the Internet and which systems do not. It shows you overall how the network flow is set up based on your security groups, routing, and everything. I have got a good use out of that.

The setup can be better. With every other Check Point SaaS product, the setup is scripted. You just approve deployment scripts,  and then you are off. The setup for this solution is still very much manual. I would like to see that transition to more of a scripted setup. That has been an issue when I set up a client because every client has different skill sets.

The general reporting also needs improvement. It is very cumbersome to pull the reports for big environments. I had a client environment with 50 tenants, and I had to manually run a CIS report for each tenant and download it. There were 50 different reports. I wish there was a way to get the reports for all 50 tenants in one report and not 50 different reports.

I have been working with posture management for 3 to 4 years.

I never had stability-related issues. That has always been fine.

It is scalable. You can do it, but you need to redo the setup for each and every additional account and visibility. It is scalable. It is just not quickly scalable.

I would rate their support for CloudGuard CNAPP a eight out of ten.

Positive

I have not used a posture management solution before.

Its setup is very manual. I would like to see that transition to more of a scripted setup. It is a very manual process. For the most part it is fine however I have definitely had issues with it. Sometimes, it just does not work, and I have had to open tickets.

I am an integrator and consultant.

Its price is very fair.

N/A

To the new users of this solution, I would advise not following the built-in guide while setting it up. Always open the admin guide for the most up-to-date information.

Overall, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. Even with all the issues, what you do get out of it is very valuable. The reporting and the setup are holding it back from a ten. That is where it can be improved greatly.

We use it to protect our applications in the cloud. We are doing a lot more cloud migration. We are moving all our applications into the cloud and our servers into the cloud. We need to protect our servers in the cloud.

By implementing CloudGuard CNAPP, we wanted to make sure we get alerts so that we can react much faster.

We use CloudGuard CNAPP's Cloud Security Posture Management capabilities. It knows all the accounts that were spun up. When we create an account in the cloud, it is onboarded automatically. We pull it into automation. Whenever someone changes any settings on the infrastructure side, the posture management will flag it. Sometimes, there is a way to automate a change. If we put some settings, it can make changes right away to shut that down.

Cloud Security Posture Management has a lot of compliances. It helps us to make sure our cloud configuration is up to a certain standard. If we have to be compliant, we have a good start on where we are.

Cloud Security Posture Management identifies the risks that are most critical to our business. It gives a risk score for what is being discovered. After we have that score, it is up to us how fast we want to remediate an issue. Sometimes, we might think that it is not crucial, and we might not take immediate action on it. 

We send every finding to our backend SIEM and work with our SOC to remediate those findings. Our SOC environment has that visibility of the logs so that we can react.

We know the vulnerability in advance, so we can take some action for that vulnerability. It is mostly all about how fast we can react to something.

We could see its benefits right away after we deployed the technology. However, getting visibility does not mean that we can react fast. For that, we have to work closely with all the app guys or server guys to patch all the things after we get the visibility.

Down the road, we would like to see automation. That is probably a feature that most people want. If they can automate patching a vulnerability, it will be much easier.

I have been using CloudGuard CNAPP for about four years.

I am not aware of any problems.

So far, so good. We have plans to increase its usage, but it depends on the collaboration with multiple groups.

We have been using it with a small group in our organization. We want to make sure that this group benefits from it, and then we can use that use case and expand that use case throughout the organization. Currently, it is being used for a small group, and there is an ongoing effort to make it more visible.

They are good and responsive. We have a dedicated engineer, which is good. We have a certain person to go to for any questions or any problems. It has been good so far. Sometimes, we do experience slowness in responding, but overall, it has been pretty good.

We have been using CloudGuard from day one. It used to be known by another name. We have been using it before the name change. We are long-time customers.

Currently, we are just dealing with the public cloud. We have AWS and Azure clouds. 

Its deployment needs a lot more collaboration. From the cybersecurity side, we can only do certain things to protect our environment. From the app side, it also needs collaboration with whoever is managing that application or server. A lot of collaboration is needed rather than just having the security person.

When we get all the permission to do the deployment, it is a lot easier. The security team does not hold the key to the kingdom, so we do not have access to all environments. Once we get that access, it can be deployed a lot easily.

We have definitely seen an ROI. We have not quantified it, but the notifications about misconfiguration or vulnerabilities by CloudGuard CNAPP are helping us to improve our site. Our risk is much lower. It lowers our risk on how we do things, and sometimes, it is hard to quantify that into money.

The licensing part still needs some work. The issue that I have is that we do not use all the services in the cloud, but sometimes, CloudGuard identifies them as an asset. 

We did not explore other options. We are just leveraging what CloudGuard has.

To those evaluating this solution, I would recommend trying it. You never know what you will see until you try.

It is a good product. We definitely want to see more features. We constantly try to see the new features being integrated into the product so that we can leverage them.

We are not yet using CloudGuard CNAPP's CloudGuard Workload Protection capabilities. Because the workload side is hosted by a different group, it requires collaboration. We need to work closely with the workload group. We are looking at opportunities to see if we can collaborate.

We are not yet using CloudGuard Workload Protection for VMs, containers, and serverless, but we are interested in looking into it. If we have it, the scanning provided by CloudGuard Workload Protection will help us identify problems before they go live. I have seen a demo of it, and I am looking into whether we can deploy it for our environment. It will give our cybersecurity visibility. It will help us know what is going on, and then we can react to it.

We are also not using CloudGuard CNAPP's CloudGuard CDR (formerly Intelligence) and its intrusion detection and threat-hunting capabilities. I would love to use that and get some benefits out of it sometime in the future.

I would rate CloudGuard CNAPP an eight out of ten. Automation is what we are looking for because we do not have enough time and people to handle all the events and findings.

CloudGuard is a SaaS security solution that handles compliance and security for cloud.

There are two major functions, and the first is to operate as a central firewall monitoring and management system in the cloud. We have more than 100 firewalls in the cloud, and CloudGuard allows us to manage them.

The second function is its role as a compliance suite that helps you in keeping your cloud platforms compliant with PCI or ISO 27001.

For the most part, this is what I used it for. In the beginning, CloudGuard did not have many features. There were only these two.

Using CloudGuard, I was able to manage a multi-cloud platform based on AWS, Azure, and Google for a multinational company in Europe with only three engineers.

CloudGuard enables customizable governance using simple, readable language. The biggest advantage is that when there are things to be changed because of compliance problems, the engineers receive a plain-language text that instructs them on what to do. This also means that you don't have to have as many cloud specialists available.

The two most valuable features for us are the central firewall administrator and the real-time cloud compliance monitoring. The vendor has been building on these features, but they are the two that are most important for us.

With respect to how the compliance frameworks affect our security and compliance operations, it is important to consider that first of all, in the cloud, anybody can change a firewall. We wanted to have a central firewall administrator, with our more than 100 firewalls, so that we could make sure that our platform would stay secure. CloudGuard alerts if somebody replaces something and puts it back, which is the biggest feature that we wanted.

Then, as an added feature, they have a real-time audit platform where you constantly have audits of your clouds to see that engineers don't forget to put all of the compliance in place.

CloudGuard's accuracy when it comes to compliance checking is very good, and it is done in real-time. I would rate it a nine out of ten. It is not perfect because sometimes you have false positives, although I don't think that you can get rid of them entirely. Overall, for compliance and diverse compliance methodologies, I would rate it a nine.

On the topic of accuracy, I would rate remediation a nine out of ten as well. It is easy to do because it is written in plain language, and also because there is a manual on how to remediate.

The false positives can be annoying at times.

We have been using CloudGuardfor five years.

My experience with CloudGuard began about five and a half years ago when I was working with a company that was building a multi-cloud platform. I was one of the first customers for CloudGuard, before the Check Point acquisition, and I was using it to manage my multi-cloud platform.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. It has always worked and I've never had a bad thing happen with it. In the beginning, when they introduced new features during beta testing, there were issues. However, it was always stable.

CloudGuard is a SaaS solution, so it scales with your cloud. When you get hundreds of firewalls, perhaps 200 or 300 of one, then the complexity becomes the same in CloudGuard as the thing that you want to solve in the cloud, so I don't think that they can extend to that.

I have a deployment that is European-wide, multi-cloud, with approximately 480 virtual machines. There were a lot of other components as well, so it was a really huge use case.

The technical support from CloudGuard is really good. In fact, for me at the time, it was really good because I had direct access to the American team, so I just had to call if there was an issue. I also had monthly meetings with them to discuss things to improve and see if their service was okay for us.

Positive

Initially, we used another solution but that was not for firewall security. Rather, it was for compliance.

The initial setup is really easy. Just submit the cloud key. It takes between an hour and two hours to deploy. When I installed it, the process did not take longer than an hour.

My implementation strategy fits into the way I design secure private clouds or multi-clouds, based on public cloud providers. It's almost a necessity. You can do it in other ways by using the local ACLs, etc, but then it becomes cumbersome. CloudGuard takes a lot of the work out of it and gives you a single point to manage all of your security firewalls.

I deployed CloudGuard myself. In my previous role, I was the head of cloud development and I directed two out of the three engineers in the team.

In the beginning, the price of CloudGuard was cheap, whereas now it is not.

I haven't gotten the latest pricing, but my advice is that you need to balance it out with your cloud business cases. It all depends on how many machines, servers, and the size of the cloud that you have. It's probably not useful if you have only a few machines and some network security groups to manage them. In this case, it's not something that you need.

I did evaluate another tool initially. I cannot recall the name but it had ".io" after it. Ultimately, we decided not to use it because it only had the compliance component and it was more expensive.

The native cloud security controls provided by the cloud vendors, when it comes to features like transparency and customization, are very weak. That's why you need CloudGuard. On their own, I would rate the native cloud security controls a four out of ten. They are complex, and the biggest issue is that it's difficult to secure if you want to centralize your security operation.

When maintaining and scaling security services and configurations across multiple public clouds using CloudGuard, versus using native cloud security controls, I find that it is much better. It's the same interface in CloudGuard, regardless of the cloud. Of course, your firewall administrator still needs to have knowledge of what he's doing. That doesn't change. The important point is that the interface is much better and it doesn't change between cloud environments.

I would rate the accuracy of the security visibility slightly lower than nine out of ten because it's still complex to do, even with CloudGuard. The biggest feature of CloudGuard is that it rolls back the changes when somebody has changed it in the cloud without authorization, yet the complexity of managing a lot of firewalls is still there. I would rate the accuracy of security visibility a seven and a half or eight out of ten.

I would rate the solution's comprehensiveness for cloud compliance and governance an eight out of ten. The false positives are a little bit annoying at times.

CloudGuard helps to minimize the attack surface and manage dynamic access, although I didn't use the dynamic access in my setup. For my use case, it was primarily minimizing the internal attack surface because I didn't use it for external connections. I had a different role there. When you only have three engineers, you need to trust them. The reason that we used CloudGuard was to be able to do it with a few engineers.

CloudGuard provides a unified security solution across AWS, Azure, and Google, but not for anything else. To that end, I don't think that any other cloud provider would be a market contender at this point, and Google will probably even disappear after a while.

My advice for anybody who is considering CloudGuard is to try it. If you're looking to manage a large security defense platform, in-depth, with a lot of firewalls, try it and you'll be surprised.

One of the things that I learned from using CloudGuard was that it offered support for compliance. I was originally just looking for a way to manage all of these firewalls, and that came as a pleasant surprise. It helped us a lot with our ISO 27000 and PCI certification.

Overall, in terms of functionality, CloudGuard is fairly well made.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

When a customer has a multi-cloud environment with AWS, Azure, GCP, or any other cloud, maintaining posture across the cloud environment is very difficult. They need a CNAPP solution for governance and centralized compliance. It gives centralized visibility where they can track each and every cloud account, compliance check, misconfigurations, risks, and vulnerabilities. Accordingly, they can take remediation action as well. That is the main purpose of a CNAPP solution.

CloudGuard CNAPP helps to be compliant across a multi-tenant environment. We can be sure of the compliance status with respect to different cloud tenants. There is visibility into each and every cloud tenant. It is very easy to get visibility from a single console. Centralized management gives good granular control where we can check the risks and vulnerabilities and also do remediation centrally.

Its benefits can be realized in four weeks. It is API integration, so it is very straightforward. You integrate with the client, and you start monitoring. You get the information in real-time. The overall implementation time frame is about four weeks. The first two weeks can be for the monitoring stage. In the third week, you can fine-tune your policies, and in the fourth week, you can start remediating.

Posture management is a part of CloudGuard CNAPP. CloudGuard CNAPP is a combination of three technologies: Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Workload Protection (CWP), and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM). It is a combination of technologies. When customers use CloudGuard CNAPP, they use all these three models.

Cloud Security Posture Management is very good for identifying misconfiguration. It is able to capture all misconfigurations.

They maintain different compliance standards. Apart from that, they are also very good with the alerts and notification part. Whenever they perform a scan and find a vulnerability, it is sent to different channels as an alert or notification. It is good. They only need to improve the impact analysis on CSPM.

Cloud Security Posture Management identifies the risks that are most critical to the business. In terms of time savings, it can identify a risk within 10 to 15 minutes instead of it being a day-long task. The scanning happens in almost real-time. It is a good feature they have given, and I appreciate their solution.

The scanning provided by CloudGuard Workload Protection helps to identify problems before they go live. It has good capability for that. It can perform a proactive analysis, and we can identify the risks or vulnerabilities before the exploit. This identification of problems is very important because knowing about a problematic scenario in advance and being able to address it can save us a huge business loss. A proactive analysis is very critical. In the cybersecurity domain, it is one of the critical features for every customer.

CloudGuard CNAPP gives us the severity score. When it identifies any risks or vulnerabilities, it assigns a severity score.

CloudGuard CNAPP gives good visibility across all the multi-cloud tenants. We have everything covered in one solution. It covers risks, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, compliance, data security, data loss, etc. It gives good visibility. This visibility is important for customers.

The identification of misconfigurations, maintenance of compliance in a centralized way, and visibility across all the multi-cloud tenants are the key functionalities.

The first improvement area is the impact analysis. The impact analysis that they perform can be improved. It is currently lacking. It should be more detailed.

The second improvement area is that they should adopt more remediation on various resources.

The third improvement area is that they should introduce Gen-AI capability on their platform so that remediation can be very easy. They have the threat hunting and detection part, but they need to adapt more on the Gen-AI side so that the remediation can happen automatically. People should be able to do remediation with a click. It would be a very good feature to have for remediation.

These are three main improvement areas for them. I have already provided Check Point feedback about these through another channel.

With respect to Cloud Workload Protection, they should introduce more granular security control in terms of policy. I feel they should work on it and develop it more. They need to provide more granular security control in terms of various attacks, such as the MITRE ATT&CK framework. They need to give a different policy for each technique and tactic such as ransomware, exploitation, etc. I also work with CrowdStrike, so I know about different types of granular controls. From the Cloud Workload Protection perspective, they need to improve the policy framework.

I have been working with CloudGuard CNAPP for 2 years.

I have not seen any issues. It works in the passive mode, so it does not impact performance or anything like that.

It is a scalable solution. Every SaaS solution is scalable, so CloudGuard CNAPP is also a scalable solution.

I have not contacted them much, which is a good thing. CloudGuard CNAPP works in a passive mode. If anything needs to be done, it has to be done in your cloud tenant. There are very few times when you or an admin is required to communicate with the support team.

I also work with CrowdStrike and Palo Alto. CrowdStrike does not have the CNAPP capability. CrowdStrike is an EDR solution.

Palo Alto has the Prisma solution. Its capabilities are similar to Check Point. They are similar to me. I do not see much difference. There might be some difference in the cost, but technology-wise, they are the same.

CloudGuard CNAPP is a SaaS-based solution, and you need to integrate all your cloud accounts into that. That is it.

You need to integrate your cloud account or onboard your cloud account in the CloudGuard CNAPP solution by doing the API integration. After you onboard, you first put the cloud account in the monitoring mode. You monitor things for two weeks. After you validate your findings on CloudGuard CNAPP and you do not see any false positives, you can go for the block mode as well. That is the approach the industry should follow while onboarding any CNAPP solution.

You start to get an ROI from the day you deploy CloudGuard CNAPP or integrate it with your cloud account. 

It is like insurance. When something happens, only then you realize its value. CloudGuard CNAPP works in the same way. Without such a solution, it is very difficult to find vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and data breaches on each and every cloud tenant. When you integrate CloudGuard CNAPP with your cloud account, you get a single view. It is very easy for your cloud administrator to take quick action. The ROI starts once you integrate or onboard a cloud account with CloudGuard CNAPP.

After you have subscribed to CloudGuard CNAPP, I would advise onboarding your cloud account and then monitoring your cloud account and the CloudGuard CNAPP findings for two weeks. After that, you can fine-tune the policies and then run the solution in block mode. That is the process.

A CNAPP product is mandatory for any organization that works in a multi-cloud environment.

Overall, I would rate CloudGuard CNAPP a nine out of ten.