Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP Reviews

We use Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP for the application protection of our assets on Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.

We implemented CloudGuard CNAPP to address data exposure, prevent exfiltration attempts, ensure compliance with frameworks like SOC 2 and PCI DSS, and gain improved oversight of our cloud environment.

We haven't had any cloud security incidents since implementing CloudGuard CNAPP in 2017. It's been a critical tool as we've grown our cloud usage, transitioning applications from data centers to the cloud. CloudGuard's scalability has kept pace with our growth. As the third-largest enterprise user of Azure, our cloud footprint is significant.

The benefits of CloudGuard CNAPP were immediately apparent upon deployment. Back in 2017, we found ourselves needing to catch up on securing our existing AWS assets. We required a solution that offered quick implementation and usability. CloudGuard was the first platform we considered, and we've continued to expand its use alongside Check Point's ongoing development of new capabilities.

We create custom rules to address our organization's unique security policies, in addition to leveraging the built-in rules within CloudGuard CNAPP's CSPM module. This flexibility is crucial for us.

While CloudGuard CNAPP's CSPM capabilities effectively provide compliance rule sets and security best practices, it's important to understand that this is just one aspect of achieving full alignment with security frameworks. To be fully compliant, additional measures outside of CloudGuard need to be addressed and implemented. However, CloudGuard CNAPP remains a valuable piece of the puzzle.

CSPM helps us identify the most critical business risks. It's a time-saver that translates into cost savings. CSPM provides insights from multiple perspectives. We can analyze what a breach would mean for the business, including brand reputation and the significant cost and time required for recovery. Even in terms of day-to-day operations, CSPM saves us employee hours by streamlining security tasks.

The security provided by the CWP for containers is good. We are extremely satisfied.

Our CI/CD environment utilizes some scanning capabilities offered by workload protection, but it's not fully integrated. This creates limitations in proactively identifying issues before deployment. When we do use the workload protection capabilities they are critical for us.

Cloud security posture management is the feature we've been using the longest. What we particularly like about it is the rule-based capability. This allows us to develop our own custom rules using the GSL language provided by the CloudGuard platform.

The platform would be significantly enhanced by incorporating data security management capabilities.

I'd like to see CloudGuard offer more agentless functionality beyond what's currently available.

I have been using Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP for over seven years.

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP is extremely stable and if there is an issue, Check Point is on top of it.

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP is scalable. We haven't run into any scale issues and we have scaled significantly over the last six years.

We plan on expanding it into some of the newer capabilities that Check Point is coming out with.

The technical support is good.

Positive

The initial deployment was straightforward. As a SaaS platform, it is extremely easy to deploy it into environments.

We can deploy CloudGuard CNAPP and use it out of the box within hours.

Our initial strategy was to implement a basic solution and then expand its capabilities over time. Check Point, frankly, has done an excellent job of keeping its platform up-to-date by continuously adding and improving features. This is why we're still using it even after six years.

I would rate Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP nine out of ten.

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP is predominantly owned by and controlled by the central security organization within our company.

Details matter. When comparing features to other security solutions on the market, the ability to develop custom rules is important to us, along with security posture capabilities. The ability to scale flawlessly is also important to us. The direct and overwhelming support that we received from the Check Point account team, the support team, and the leadership team has been fantastic.

Integrating with the cloud through APIs offered by a SaaS platform has significantly reduced the burden on our organization by eliminating the need for all the complex backend work we previously had to handle. This experience highlights the importance of embracing new ways of doing things.

One use case was for compliance. The second one was for workload protection, and the third one was for threat hunting in the cloud.

We are able to meet compliance very easily, and we are able to feel a lot more comfortable with the fact that when we have developers deploying things in the cloud, the right guardrails are in place. 

CloudGuard CNAPP's Cloud Security Posture Management capabilities are top-notch. We use it for misconfiguration and compliance reporting. I would rate it an eight out of ten for that. It is quite good.

We use CloudGuard CNAPP's Workload Protection capabilities. The security that it provides is very good. We like it because we are able to do it in both runtime and with Kubernetes Guardrails.

Threat intelligence is another piece that we use, and it is awesome because it lets us do a lot of threat hunting that we were not able to do before, especially in AWS.

The most valuable feature is the ability to work with the APIs to integrate into our own backend systems. 

The threat intelligence is quite unique because we could not find another vendor that had the ability to make all the findings actionable. They have this thing called Event Risk management, and it consolidates things down to make it easy for us to take action on it.

The reporting has a lot of opportunities to continuously improve so that we can continue to show value.

I would love to see more ability to automate and integrate into even more systems for automatic remediation.

We have been using Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP for three and a half years.

It is very rare to have an outage.

It scaled up for us for hundreds of accounts.

They are pretty good, but I wish they had people who are a little bit more knowledgeable at the first level. I would rate them a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We used Palo Alto's Prisma Cloud. We switched because it did not have the feature sets we were looking for. The price was not very flexible, and we did not get the type of support we needed. It was not like the support that we get from Check Point as our partner.

Its deployment is very straightforward.

We definitely got an ROI. I do not have to put as many people as I did before with Prisma Cloud. I need two full-time employees less than Prisma Cloud to work on it.

We looked at Wiz, and we looked at Orca. Prisma was our incumbent, but ultimately, we picked Check Point based on the outcomes we were able to get in our proof of concept, and we felt that the support was much better.

I would rate Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP a nine out of ten. It is a pretty awesome product, but there is always room for improvement. I would have rated everything else we tested a six out of ten.

Check Point CloudGuard Intelligence Security is one of the most robust tools on the market. That's why we decided to implement it in our company when all our operations were migrated to the Azure cloud area. 

We needed a tool that would provide security in the network and help analyze any vulnerabilities that we might face in these new environments. We wanted to be able to attack all the weak points that we have in the cloud in order to guarantee effective and stable security. We also have some applications in our systems that deserve excellent security.

Check Point CloudGuard Intelligence came to strengthen our security and has helped the IT department achieve excellent network security. 

In addition to that, it has helped us centralize all the security infrastructure in this tool and helped us a lot to counteract vulnerabilities that were present. With this product, we were able to reduce the rate of attacks that we had. The database that they have is in real-time and updated instantaneously. All these factors helped a lot to reduce vulnerabilities.

Check Point's CloudGuard Intelligence tool presents some features that should be highlighted. For example:

It presents a real-time database that is always updated.

The environment can be centralized within Check Point Infinity, and thus we can have several security tools.

It also presents a forensic analysis that helped us to determine the root of several issues. 

Integration with Sentinel can be made, which allows us to obtain more security data and analyze it.

It presents a portal that is relatively easy to use and configure.

The tool works perfectly and improvements should be made, if any, in various technical and administrative aspects.

It was implemented approximately one year ago.

Check Point CloudGuard Intelligence has good stability. We have not presented performance problems or any other that would lead to a forced restart of the tool.

The tool presents very good and functional scalability. To this day, we have not presented any problems.

The support it provides is not very good. They should improve it since we have had several setbacks due to support issues.

Positive

Previously, there was no tool in the company's infrastructure. We needed the solution when we moved to the cloud and decided to improve security.

The implementation of the tool is very easy. There are several steps in the wizard where it gets complicated around the configuration, however. If you do not have extensive knowledge of the tool, it becomes complicated.

The implementation was done through the vendor, who gave us a support engineer to help us with the implementation and configuration of the tool. We also received some training.

By making an investment in security tools, we are doing ourselves a great favor. With this tool, we are protecting our information while maintaining operations. It is always a great investment to acquire these tools. Also, afterward, there is a noticeable economic return.

Whenever an investment is made in a security tool, it is high due to many factors. that said, investing in security will provide economic returns in the short or long term since it will greatly lighten workloads and provide security.

We evaluated many options on the market, such as Fortinet, Sophos, and Cisco NGFW. However, Check Point had better features.

With the time that I have used this tool, we have noticed that it is a very good solution and that it has excellent features. It provides very secure connections.

1. Visibility for cloud workloads, including server, serverless and Kubernetes.
2. Security configuration review along with automatic remediation.
3. Posture management and compliance for a complete cloud environment.
4. Centralize visibility for a complete cloud environment of the workload hosted on multiple cloud platforms (AWS and Azure).
5. Baseline for security policy as per the workload based on services, such as S3, EC2, etc.
6. Visibility of an API call within the environment.
7. IAM management providing access to the cloud network in a controlled manner.
8. Alerts and notifications for any security breach/changes in the cloud environment.
9. Flow visibility of traffic to and from the cloud environment.
10. Real-time alerting for any security incidents.

They provide support for Azure, Amazon, GCP, and Alibaba. However, we just have AWS and Azure.

1. Provides complete visibility of the workload hosted on different cloud platforms (AWS and Azure) along with multiple tenants. 
2. Helps in enhancing security for cloud environments by providing reports, both in terms of security and compliance. 
3. Provides complete visibility of traffic flowing to/from the cloud platform.
4. Provides best practice policy that helps to strengthen the security of the workload.
5. Assets inventory and API calls can happen from the cloud.
6. Provides control in terms of accessing the cloud workload. As a policy is created, this will block direct access to the cloud environment in case the same is not define or approved in Dome9.

Security visibility with Dome9 is excellent. Normally, without this type of solution, especially if you have some workloads hosted on Azure, they give you minimal tools to be able to analyze the loss. There are different consoles that need to be checked for analyzing any incident. In the case of Dome9, it gives you the loss provided in a report on a centralized console. It gives you complete visibility, including the IP to IP Flow, which is happening from the workloads to the Internet or the Internet to the workloads. Even in case of getting a threat intelligence from Check Point, which we have the integration, if some workflows are communicating any suspicious IPs, then the reports are available on the flow logs. On top of that, it also provides a report where you will be able to find out from which location or country you are getting the traffic to your workloads. Therefore, if you want to block certain geo-locations from communicating with your network, then you can also do that using Dome9.

The workload, which was taking a day's time, now can be turned out within hours. We are able to analyze the logs in real-time. Previously, if we enabled some services, then the email needed to be sent to the security team who would do the scanning, might submit the reports, and post some action to be taken by the developers. Using this solution, we are getting the reports in real-time. The remediation can also be applied automatically. The developer can take the necessary action immediately. It provides us what action needs to be taken.

Unless we did some scanning, we used to not know that there were security flaws within particular services. However, by using Dome9, as it has complete visibility, we are getting those details much faster.

The firewall normally has been managed by security team. Admins can bypass through firewall to create any policy. They can go outside and downloading/uploading anything from their workloads. This solution provides that control as well.

1. The IAM role gives us complete control over the cloud environment. In case someone tries to bypass and create a user or policy locally, which is not allowed or defined in Dome9, changes will be rolled back and a notification will be sent to the concerned team.
2. It's always ON and available on a mobile device using the app.
3. There is complete visibility of the traffic flow with threat intelligence provided from Check Point. It even provides communication detail on any suspicious IPs.
4. Provides detailed information if some workload tries to directly access and bypass any firewall policy.
5. Provides a granular level of reports along with issues based on compliance standards, which are defined depending upon organizational requirements.
6. Task delegation as a particular incident can be assigned to a particular individual. The same can also be done manually or automatically.
7. Customizes queries for detecting any incident.

The solution is pretty straightforward to use, as it is only a SaaS model. You just need to enable the accounts for which Dome9 needs to do validation, and that's it.

Compliance checking capabilities: When you enroll your account, we have multiple accounts. Once you enter that on Dome9, it does a complete scan of your account based on these flow logs. It checks: "What are the security flaws?" So, the compliance depends on the company and what they are using as a benchmark. Normally, for India, we use the CIS as a benchmark, then whatever flow logs are available, those are provided in the reports. Then, we check those compliance reports against the CIS benchmark, and accordingly, take actions. We can then know what are the deviation on the cloud platform and on the account, with respect to the CIS.

There are some use cases where you will not have reports readily available or not get the dashboard for particular outputs. You can create a query on the console for those, e.g., if a particular EXE file started on a workload, we can find out if that is running anywhere in the cloud. While it does not provide details on the process level, it will provide us with which sensor is communicating to which IP addresses as well as if there are any deviations from that pattern.

It has remediation capabilities, and there are two options available:

1. You can do automatic remediation, where you need to define the policy for which unit that you are doing remediation. 
2. It can be assigned to a particular team or group of people for its particular vulnerabilities of security flaws. That ticket can then be raised to service quotas be remediated manually.

1. Policy validation should be available before it is deployed in a production environment using a cloud template.
2. Automatic remediation requires read/write access. When providing read/write access to third-party applications, this can add risk. It should have some options of triggering API calls to the cloud platform, which in turn, can make the required changes.
3. A number of security rules need to be added in order to identify more issues. 
4. The reporting should have more options. The reports should be more granular.
5. It should support all container platforms for visibility of a complete infrastructure single console, such as, PCF.

Three months.

Until now, we have not faced any issues in term of downtime or outages. It seems to be quite stable.

Scalability is not an issue. There are a number of workload licenses that need to be procured, then it is straightforward.

There are between eight to 10 security admins and auditors who have access to Dome9.

Our complete cloud workload is managed through Dome9.

The support is excellent. They regularly review our cloud infrastructure and provide suggestions to help us have a better security posture.

Initially, we were using tools provided by the service provider, such as, ScoutSuite, AWS Config Rules, AWS Trusted Advisor, or Amazon GuardDuty for monitoring, and similar tools for Azure as well. Then, we needed to go through a different console to identify any incidents.

Initially, we used submit a report, but there was no remediation nor information provided how to remediate workload issues. In our current scenarios, we are able to get the complete visibility. The complete visibility of the solution has been a key to the increase in our productivity.

The initial setup was straightforward. The only thing that was required from our side was a cloud template, which was provided by Dome9. We need to executed that template in our cloud environment for AWS and Azure. It automatically creates a read-only ID on the AWS platform for Dome9 to connect with. There is some configuration which needs to be done on Dome9 as well as AWS, but the deployment takes around 15 to 30 minutes.

Check Point's team was available, but we implemented it in-house with our support team.

We don't require staff for deployment and maintenance of this solution.

As it is a security product, the ROI will not have that much importance because it is enhancing your security and/or providing more security to your infrastructure. If there are any security incidents, then Dome9 is able to protect us.

Initially, once the solution was deployed into production, then the scanning used to happen and we used to see the environment's visibility. In the current situation, as everyone is moving to the DevOps environment and using the CI/CD pipelines, it helps us to analyze vulnerabilities way before they get installed in production and the web. It gives us more security in the production environment.

The licensing and costs are straightforward, as they have a baseline of 100 workloads (number of instances) within one license with no additional nor hidden charges. If you want to have 200 workloads under Dome9, then you need to take out two licenses for that. Also, it does not have any impact on cloud billing, as data is shared using the API call. This is well within the limit of free API calls provided by the cloud provider.

We evaluated Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and Trend Micro Cloud One Conformity.

Normally, the policies are accessible only on the browsers, e.g., if you compile them from Prisma Cloud, they're available as a part of a browser. However, for management users, especially for CIOs and CTOs, it becomes difficult for them to type URLs, then login. In the case of Dome9, they provide an app. With that app, you can directly login with single sign-on. It is much easier to access using the app compared to the browser option.

Most things are the same for all three providers. The major difference between Dome9 and Prisma is the IAM roles. The maturity of IAM roles available in Dome9 are much better than the other two solutions. Currently, our focus is mostly on what is happening and who is making the changes in the environment. Another thing is the visibility that Dome9 provides through its intel is better than the other two solutions.

The other two solutions have system capabilities better than Check Point.

I would recommend Prisma as well as Dome9 because they both have the visibility. In our case, the IAM was a critical piece of our requirements.

The cloud and on-prem environments are completely two different networks.

They should offer the cloud in India. Soon, there will be GDPR and India will have its own data protection laws. This might create some issues in the case of the data residing outside India. Because we are collecting metadata from the internal networks for the cloud environment, this is the reason that I suggest that they should have some plans to have the cloud in India. However, neither Prisma nor Trend Micro have cloud in India.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

We use CloudGuard to secure apps we develop in the cloud.

Before Check Point, we didn't have a cloud solution. Having a CNAPP solution gives us confidence that our cloud apps are secure. From day one, we saw that the product was working and detecting issues in real-time. 

CloudGuard's best feature is real-time detection. We can detect incidents and vulnerabilities in our code with one click. I was amazed by CloudGuard's VM protection. It's easy to deploy, and I feel safe. I'm absolutely satisfied with it. 

I have used CloudGuard for about one year.

CloudGuard is stable. I haven't had any issues. 

CloudGuard is scalable. We've had no problems implementing it for our cloud infrastructure. 

I rate Check Point support 10 out of 10. Check Point's technical support is excellent. 

Positive

The implementation was fast and easy, and Check Point's professional services are highly effective and professional. We deployed it with an in-house team of two to three people. 

The cost-effectiveness of this investment was high. The money was well spent because I solved my security problems. 

I would like CloudGuard's pricing to be cheaper, but I think that's impossible. The pricing is the only thing I think they can improve.

I rate Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP nine out of 10. I recommend that complex corporations test CloudGuard before implementing it. When you see the solution in action, you can witness its security and power.

We mainly use it as a CSPM solution.

It gives us clarity.

The most valuable feature is the ability to see our customers' environments if they use more than one cloud provider, such as AWS, Google, and Azure.

Also, CloudGuard CDR's intrusion detection and threat hunting capabilities are good enough. They help us detect anomalous behavior and respond to threats before they become an issue.

There are regulatory requirements. I would like to be able to pick the regulation I would like to scheck compliance with and it would tell you where you stand on that regulation and what you are missing to reach compliance. And it shouldn't matter which cloud we're dealing with; we would have these possibilities.

I have been using Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP for about two years.

Scalability really isn't an issue with everything in the cloud. That's the essence of a cloud product: the scalability you get compared to on-prem.

Their technical support is perfect. When we contact them, they answer immediately. Their support knows the platform very well.

We did not use a different solution before.

It's very simple to set up because it's all in the cloud.

We have seen a return on investment. It can reduce the human resources we need. Also, there is ROI from everything connected to the fact that it's in the cloud: I don't need someone for management or to pay for on-prem resources, such as CPU.

If I compare the price of CloudGuard, Palo Alto is more expensive and others are less expensive. CloudGuard CNAPP is in the middle.

We looked at other solutions, but with CloudGuard everything is located in the cloud. It's very convenient for us to manage our assets in the cloud.

If they could reduce the price and provide more capabilities, it would be better.

CheckPoint Dome9 is a cloud security management solution for our Azure cloud environment, and we have Azure for our cloud services. With this solution, we manage our network security policy management and automation for our cloud environment across providers, accounts, and regions.

Dome9 provides us policy compliance based on our requirements. If we request SOX or HIPPA, based on that we will enable the policy and we will get the reports as well.

We also create users and set policies and we can monitor the logs.

Dome9 is a very good product for us as we are using a hybrid solution. We have some of the services on-premises and some of the services on the cloud. With Dome9, we very well manage our security policies and also set the compliance policies based on requirements.

Now, we can also support the asset management of our cloud resources, posture management, and many more.

IAM is a very good and unique feature of Dome9. IAM gives us complete control of our cloud environment. For example, if someone tries to bypass the policy and attempts to configure or create some users, then it will not allow them to do so. Also, it sends a notification to the concerned person.

We can monitor each activity from our mobile devices, so there is complete visibility of our cloud traffic flows, with threat intelligence provided by Check Point. The IAM provides us complete safety and security.   

In Dome9, there should be a policy validation option where we can validate the policy before we push it into production. This option is very important, as we are working in a critical and complex environment. This option would give us more confidence in our activities or policy pushing.

We could see the option is available for on-premises devices. 

Automatic remediation requires read/write access.

Otherwise, overall this product is very good for our cloud environment, and we are satisfied with this.  

We have been using Dome9 for the past six months.

It's a very stable product.

Dome9 is very good in terms of scalability.

The technical support is excellent.

We did not use another solution prior to Dome9.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We implemented using a vendor team.

We did not evaluate other options.

We have used CNAPP on our OpenShift test cluster but are planning to deploy it in our production clusters. We used CNAPP to enhance the visibility of our cloud-deployed applications. It offers various modules to do so. For example, the Posture Management module shows you exposed secrets and security misconfigurations and also gives you hints and ready-to-use JSON configuration files to fix them. 

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) gives you visibility and management automation of identities, roles, entitlements, and privileges in your cloud environments. This helps you find and fix identity- and role-related security holes by constructing a complex privileges graph, which shows you granted permissions and enforced ones, suggesting you enforce the stricter and more secure enforced ones over the ones you granted.

The various CNAPP modules have granted more visibility of our cloud applications to our system engineers and developers. Doing so helps our transition to the cloud by making the management and administrative tasks of our cloud and system engineers easier, as well as suggesting and helping to prioritize patching and updating.

The most valuable features include the Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) module, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), and Cloud Workload Protection (CWP).

The costs are really high if you want the entire capabilities of the platform. However, it is really motivated by the great value of the product. Moreover, you can buy individual licenses for the different modules if you don't need some of them.

I've used the solution for one year.