Check Point CloudGuard Network Security Reviews

We install the solution for our customers and Check Point is our preferred solution in any firewall deployment. The two-layer architecture with the administration and security makes a difference and in every instance, we know who the user is.

The touch features are very different than other brands. From the feedback I get from my customers, Check Point is the best.

Check Point gives us a strong solution that we can depend on when deploying it for clients.

The most valuable features are within the unique architecture that creates flexibility in the deployment.

The knowledge base that is available is limited and it is on a closed network where only a customer or certified engineer will know about it. A beginner who wants to learn about the product actually has to enroll in training or get certified and have a valid license or certification to access information. That is something I find strange as most users would like to know about it. The new users would like to be able to see those areas and what type of concerns or any configuration issues they may have before deciding to work with the product. To me, that is a simple open-mindedness. In terms of the availability of the system and functionality of the product, there's no concern. But the problem is that efficient VSX (Virtual System Extension) deployment is complicated. Most of our customers are afraid to deploy any configuration changes because they are afraid something will happen.

It's not the same situation as with other products. I guess the reason behind it is the kind of architecture which they are using. There are more possibilities to crash than other products. That is the feedback I normally get from end-users, but even so, for us, I would say it's one of the best product.

Check Point is very stable. I would say that initially there were a couple of issues we had during deployments. But now we have climbed the learning curve of the product and all installations are very stable. We have most clients running on version 7.3 and didn't upgrade most further from there because we know that 7.3 is stable and it is what we are running most of the customers now.

Scalability is fine. In fact, we are demonstrating the hyper scale with most of the customer now. There is no doubt about the scalability and it is not a problem.

Up until now, we have not had to register with technical support from Check Point. If we needed help we got support with the presale technical support team from our region. He was able to help us internally. The team helps us to get products stable. Up until now, we did not contact them. It is not very transparent. They approach resolutions through a partner and the partner solves the case. They seem to mostly depend on partners for the resolution of issues.

We deploy a variety of products for our clients depending on their needs. Check Point is one of the most reliable.

I would say that the installation is straightforward when you have learned about the architecture. Before that, the installations may be a little confusing.

We are partners with Check Point so we handle the installations and deployment. In the beginning, we did have some engineers from Check Point assist us in the initial installations, but after that it was fine and we were able to manage it by ourselves.

Check Point pricing is high. It is a sector where there is heavy competition so it does not help when trying to sell the product. But one thing is that the sales chain is fantastic. The price is usually the most difficult thing when we discuss Check Point with customers, their feedback is that it is not a competitively inexpensive product. Clients want to know why that is and if we could scale the price. Check Point can have more presence in the market, but if they want it to compete, they have to come down in price a little more. I would say 20 to 30% lower. The product is fine.

The web application firewall is commonly used in most firewalls now. If they can add that as a feature, it would be a very strong scenario. When we use Check Point on a perimeter or a DMZ zone, the first thing that clients ask is if there is wireless protection. Check Point has IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) but it does not have wireless protection. So if production is using the cloud if they can integrate mobile app protection, mobile shielding, there's more value for Check Point, but if they include that, Check Point could be the very best firewall option.

On a scale from one to ten, when one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Check Point as an eight. It needs to do better in pricing and with broader features for mobile.

One thing that I learned from multiple installations of Check Point is that you have to train the customer before implementing. Unless the customer is already a highly skilled security engineer so that they know what they can get out of the product, they will not be as satisfied. Otherwise, just before the deployment, we have them go for training so they understand the product and what it can do.

They will be happier and they won't choose to go with another product in the future. Even with my engineers who understand many other products, I trained them properly before I send them out for deployments. Check Point is not a product that if you don't know you can just install without knowing anything about it. You have to know the architecture first. You have to know each and every option than work on the product. Then it will be far better and say no to certain features which are not important to use. On the other hand, knowing it is available is fantastic and becomes an option in the right situations.

We primarily use the solution as firewall security for our clients.

The IPS, application and URL filtering, as well as Identity Awareness, are all very valuable features.

Reporting needs improvement. It's difficult to utilize properly. Currently, I'm in a situation whereby a client of ours is looking for reporting on their organizational unit. Check Point has failed to do that. We've been trying to do it for the past month and we haven't been able to. We've also gotten techs from Check Point to call us to help and we just can't get the solution to do what we need it to do.

Sometimes, if you aren't familiar with the solution, it can be a bit complex, but it does become easier to use with time. However, every time they launch a new version, it becomes more complex and you need to take time to get familiar with all the changes. For every version that they upgrade, you need to upskill yourself. 

The stability of the solution is fantastic.

The scalability potential of the solution is great. We use the solution quite extensively. We do plan to increase usage in the future.

If I were rating technical support out of ten, I would give it a seven. They're inconsistent. Sometimes you do get guys from Check Point to help you out and then sometimes you don't. Sometimes it's hard getting a hold of them.

We didn't previously use a different solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. The time it takes to deploy depends on the organization.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

I am familiar with Fortinet, although I didn't do a direct comparison. I did compare other solutions as well.

For those who want to implement the solution, they should make sure they have a very strong networking background.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for major cloud vendors: AWS and Azure. 

Moving into the cloud without having to change a lot of our internal processes and retrain staff is one of the biggest benefits of this solution. 

It is what we use mainly for on-premise. That is really what has us using the product, as it is sort of our standard for data centers.

I would like to see more focus on east-west traffic inspection and AWS.

Things are changing very quickly in the cloud. There is a lot more maturing that needs to happen as far as CloudGuard goes, specifically more around some cloud native type situations where everything is being shoehorned through one or multiple VMs is not optimal.

We definitely have to watch new versions and deploy them in a smart way, but that is the way with any type of software.

The scalability depends on the situation. Some situations are not very scalable. High scalability, in AWS, without matting is just not there. It's more of an AWS problem than it is a Check Point problem.

We are receiving our technical support through a partner. Therefore, we do not really engage directly with Check Point that much. We use the partner for technical support matters, who is great.

We did not use anything previously. Going to the cloud was a new requirement for us.

The initial setup was just as straightforward as setting up a physical Check Point box would have been.

We implemented in-house by deploying it ourselves.

We don't really track the ROI on this.

We also considered Fortinet. Check Point has better overall integration with Azure.

I was part of the decision-making process.

I would rate it a six out of ten. 

Other vendors typically are working with hardware acceleration and various other products, which you can't get in the cloud. One of the key things that made us more comfortable with Check Point is this is only thing that they do. It's the same exact thing as they are doing on-premise for the most part.

We are integrators and implemented this product for a customer to monitor traffic and secure a network on cloud. This is a threat prevention solution and I'm the enterprise security lead. Our company is based in the Philippines and we are customers of Check Point. 

Deploying this solution has made it easier for our security analysts to monitor the network on cloud. Based on compliance, we can easily give evidence to different auditors or regulators on how to protect our cloud infrastructure. 

Advanced check prevention is a great feature that provides threat intelligence at speed. We can easily identify malicious activity and check for any vulnerabilities. The solution has great functionality and we can see the movement of data. If there's any malicious activity, we can easily stitch or make a story out of that data. I think when it comes to functionality, it's a good monitoring tool. 

The cost is a little high, it doesn't suit every budget. I'd like to see the ability to integrate with other security solutions which is not currently possible. If you need to integrate, you have to buy a Check Point product as well so you're paying for features. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable and I think they might increase their scope on different virtual, private clouds or private subnets. Monitoring involves anywhere from three to five people. 

When it comes to Check Point support, we just file a ticket on the portal. They respond based on the severity of the problem. They've been very responsive on inquiries and issues that we encountered although we haven't had any major issues.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It's like running our VM on cloud, just speeding it up. When it comes to implementation strategy, we need to list all the assets or the traffic VLANs or network segmentation we want to monitor. From there, we assess how many nodes CloudGuard Network Security needs to monitor all those VLANs. It then takes two to three weeks to implement, given the likelihood of some challenges along the way. Deployment is carried out using a mix of Check Point engineers and in-house IT people. 

In terms of security solutions and return on investment, it's really about the total assets you're protecting.

If you're managing a large cloud infrastructure this is an expensive solution. Check Point has different bundles when it comes to CloudGuard and it's a modular system.

Before purchasing it's important to assess the size of your cloud infrastructure. You need to have a concrete plan for which virtual or private network or clouds you have to scope and to do that before deciding which solution you want and what functionality you need. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10 since there has been some improvement with regard to integrations.

We use Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for the firewall. The firewall protects our various customers in the optic cloud.

Check Point CloudGuard is quick to deploy and easy for the customer to use. The user interface is user-friendly and easy to use.

The solution is not that flexible when deploying on-prem.

I have been using Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for six months.

We have had many performance issues with Check Point CloudGuard on the cloud. The issue is with the OS version at this point.

Because we are in the demo phase of using Check Point CloudGuard, we only have a small amount of users, all in our IT department.

Personally, I have not had to reach out to customer service and support, however, I understand that our clients have many clinical issues.

Positive

The initial deployment is easy. The length of time to deploy depends on the number of customers, or the number of websites the customer has. It can take anywhere from one day to a few days to deploy Check Point CloudGuard.

We use an in-house technical team to deploy the solution.

Check Point CloudGuard is proving to be a good solution for both the profit of the company and for deployment for the customer.

Check Point CloudGuard is a suitable solution for many customers that are using the cloud.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of 10.

We use a hybrid environment, so we have an on-premise data center and branch offices as well as resources in the cloud. On-premise is secured with different Check Point Gateways while for our security in the cloud we use Check Point Cloud Guard.

Depending on the traffic, we use different Cloud Guard firewalls. External traffic is handled by using a scale-set that can adapt on the fly to increase/decrease the number of firewall instances.

Internal traffic is handled by a normal Cloud Guard HA cluster with a certain amount of cores.

We used the Cloud Guard technology quite early on and used Check Point's Blueprint for our Cloud Datacenter design. By being able to use real firewalls instead of the cloud's own IP tables/inferior IPS we're able to maintain security across the whole environment (on-premise and cloud).

With the possibility to administer the cloud firewalls within the same management as on-premise firewalls, we can use the same objects/networks instead of having two sets of object databases or scripting something to have both of them synched.

Having the whole environment be under the same management is definitely is a plus.

Using a scale set to increase/decrease the amount of firewalls in the cloud helps with saving costs in the long run, as they will only increase if traffic increases and therefore saving us on licensing costs. For a normal Cloud Guard you pay for each core, so using the SS you don't have to fully size and pay for the maximum amount of traffic.

It's possible to sync the Check Point Management with the cloud portal, therefore allowing automated rules to be set in place whenever creating a new VM.

In the first phase, Cloud Guard Firewalls didn't allow minor and major upgrades. Fortunately, now you can install normal hotfixes and minor upgrades (JHF) on the Cloud firewalls. For major upgrades, it's still necessary to destroy the VMs and re-create them again. Doing that would mean new public IPs as well. We created a script for that. I still hope that major upgrades will be possible in the near future too, otherwise, you still have to script a lot for basic maintenance, instead of using tools like CDT.

The product is very scalable due to using the scale-set.

The perimeter firewall provides me control over my perimeter servers and devices.

Current cloud applications are getting good protection from CASB solutions but they are limited to data leakage and application control. Beyond that, I require something to monitor my data that flows inside of my cloud application.

Sophisticated threats, such as zero-day attacks, can't be controlled by CASB solutions. Instead, they require something that can work using artificial intelligence. They should have a correlation with machine learning algorithms to defend against today's attacks for my cloud applications.

Sophisticated attacks can't be prevented using normal SaaS security. CloudGuard SaaS is a technology that prevents not only sophisticated attacks but offers protection email threats.

Most attacks that succeed are because of SPAM emails. When users fall into an attacker's trap, Check Point's industry-leading technology provides maximum protection. It is effective against email phishing attacks and provides visibility over shadow IT applications.

Along with an email security solution, CloudGuard adds another layer of comprehensive security and we can completely rely on it.

CloudGuard comes with the best feature sets that include protection from Zero-Day attacks, which we usually get when we have blades on the perimeter firewall. These are analyzed using SandBlast Threat Emulation and SandBlast Extraction.

We are able to easily identify users who are going to use cloud applications when they log in from either a trusted network or device.

We have complete visibility of attacks originating from email including spear-phishing, spoofing, etc.

Based on the reputation of the domain and URL, the firewall allows traffic to flow.

I would like this product to provide functionality like a web application firewall, where we can fully monitor all traffic passing both to and from the cloud.

The latency should be minimized by having multiple entry points all across the world. Nearby requests will have lower latency access to cloud applications.

It would be useful to have AD integration with an on-premises server.

The API integration is complex, which is an area that should be improved.

Onboarding this product takes some expertise because it is complex compared to other services that Check Point provides.

We have been using Check Point CloudGuard Network for more than a year.

Need to focus on stability.

This solution is highly scalable.

Technical support, along with presales engineers have good knowledge of the product.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup is a mixture of straightforward and complex.

We deployed vendor

Although I don't have specifics for pricing, based on my overall experience, I can conclude that Check Point provides the best pricing when comparing to other vendors.

We did not evaluate other products.

The solution is very easy to use.

The product is quite flexible.

The installation process doesn't take very long.

We've found the stability to be quite good overall.

You can scale the solution if you need to.

Technical support is helpful and responsive.

The user interface is okay, depending on who is using it.

We haven't had any issues with integrations. It seems to handle them quite well.

We're looking forward to the next Check Point with the solution and CloudGuard and everything on the same single cloud. Right now, that's not yet the case.

We're expecting more new features in the next release, however, I'm not sure precisely what is being added.

Check Point support, beyond CloudGuard, does need some improvement.

I've been using the solution for 18 to 24 months at this point. It's been a year or two.

The product is very stable so far. We haven't had any issues. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches. The performance is reliable.

The product can scale quite well. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. It's not an issue.

We have 5,000 users on the solution in one particular case. They're on one account. It's kind-of a lot.

The CloudGuard technical support has been good so far. We have no complaints. We're quite satisfied with the level of service we receive.

From a firewall perspective, yes, we use some other solution, however, CloudGuard is basically filling a gap in the cloud area. Before them, of course, we didn't use any other thing. We were using something else that wasn't really related and when we moved to Check Point was when we first adopted CloudGuard.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It's not overly complex. 

The deployment is fast. We managed it in about 24 hours or so.

We had 12 people that assisted in the deployment process.

We have to pay a licensing fee, however, we haven't really done any comparison shopping, and therefore I can't speak to if it is affordable or expensive.

Mostly, we are satisfied with the cost. We have some discount agreements and that's enough.

The solution always updates automatically, and therefore we are always using the latest.

We do plan to continue to use the product as we've mostly been quite satisfied with it.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.