Check Point CloudGuard Network Security Reviews

We use Check Point firewalls and SMS servers in on-prem DC and in multi-cloud environments extensively. These are used to protect the perimeter, DMZ, and internal network to protect and inspect network traffic.

The firewalls are best of breed and provide extensive rich features and a diverse range of protection against DDoS, malware, ransomware, and zero-day attacks. Also, it is used for terminating client and mobile VPN tunnels, URL filtering, IDP, DLP, etc. 

The environment is Internal and a multi-tenant hosted for external clients which is a complex setup.

The new Check Point firewalls are best-of-breed and provide next-gen firewall features with AI and ML capabilities. This helps to reduce the operational support overhead and protects against new emerging threats.

Previously we used Juniper, Cisco, and other firewall platforms which have very limited capabilities and offer no inspection or threat-prevention features at all. 

Check Point has changed this dynamic completely and offers a complete security solution to protect all digital assets which is immensely helpful.

Identity awareness, URL filtering, IDS, DLP, Content Filtering, VPN, and Application Control are all excellent. They provide features to inspect internet traffic, data protection compliance, and DDoS attack detection and protection.

The Check Point firewall product that we picked up has an excellent feature set and all the required licenses, it's a nicely engineered firewall technology and has a great support team to escalate.

Features like threat prevention and protection are good to have to protect against zero-day attacks, malware, and ransomware.

Software bugs and OS releases can be very fast to keep up with. Check Point has a history of moving fast with software release and upgrade cycles which are difficult to keep up with at times.

New features should have a single-pane-of-glass view for on-prem DC and cloud environments. 

Licensing costs are very high compared to other vendors. Check Point needs to be competitive to keep the cost down for the customers and partners. 

The previous Check Point OS model had to support multiple OSs which was difficult and cumbersome (i.e. SPLAT, IPSO, GAIA).

I've used the solution for ten years.

We did use a different solution and wanted to have better security capability and visibility.

The solution is expensive but feature-rich.

We looked at other options and checked if the firewalls had all the security and compliance features required by the organization.

We were providing infrastructure security. Our corporate headquarters at the time was overseas, so we had GDPR compliance regulations. It was helping us to keep in line with our compliance.

It saved us resources. We were a lean IT department, so I was able to reassign some staff to other projects because it didn't require so much hands-on manpower.

The notifications, the visibility, and the deployment are the most valuable. It could be packaged in such a way that it took a lot of time and resources off our hands, so it was more efficient. I don't know how to quantify the time saved. It would have saved us at least two to three hours a day just because the traditional IT department has a lot of other tasks and duties. It didn't require a lot for us to become experts on the product. It was seamless. It didn't require too much learning. It was easy to use.

With the incorporation of a lot of AI and machine learning, they can build some sort of a matrix for low-level threats or low-level things that require attention. There can be automation of those tasks so that we don't have to take more time and effort. There should be machine learning to eliminate level-one types of tasks.

I used this solution for six years. I'm a Cybersecurity Instructor. I used it in my previous role. I'm not using it in my current role.

I thought it was extremely stable. I didn't see any downtime. Any of the maintenance windows were either on weekends or in time frames that didn't affect our organization. It was very good.

It would be able to scale up even bigger and beyond what our local site needed. There were about a hundred and fifty employees. It was a manufacturing organization in San Antonio, Texas, but we were just one of twenty sites all throughout the US and Europe.

They were helpful in total. I'd rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

I believe we had a WatchGuard firewall with other services coupled around it. It didn't necessarily do all of the protection that we needed, but that's what we had at the time.

I was involved in its deployment. It wasn't too challenging. It was easy to medium. Configuration with the compliance side was what took time and effort and was challenging, but it didn't have anything to do with the way the software is built. It was about getting our settings and configurations to be in alignment with the compliance.

I believe headquarters had Check Point support. 

The return on the investment was probably more beneficial to the headquarters or the mother corporation because we were just one of the remote sites that had the checkpoint infrastructure sent to us to build up our site. The bigger benefit was for the headquarters because they could manage all these individual sites from one platform. The consolidation and the standardization would have made their lives easier, but I didn't sit in a seat, so I don't know what that looked like.

We have seen time to value with this solution. It provided us with great benefits across the entire organization. We could see its value within about a month. That was probably enough time to let all of the initial shakeout and other things take place. We created a baseline after those thirty days, and we could see where we no longer needed to spend time. We could also see things where we had to take some action but were not apparent to us.

They're a little high in price. The price could be lower.

I wasn't that high in the chain to be able to make that decision. Corporate pushed it down to our site, and that's what we had to go with.

Attending an RSA Conference provides the ability to connect with others in the industry. It allows me to have a line of communication where I can reach out to them in person rather than just a digital introduction. 

In terms of the impact of attending an RSA Conference on the cybersecurity purchases made throughout the year afterward, I don't necessarily think about our purchases, but considering I'm a Cybersecurity Instructor, the people that attend our classes are going to be able to benefit because I can provide them more solutions and answers to the questions that they have.

I enjoyed it as a product. It works well. Overall, I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

My company uses the solution as an Edge firewall and East-West firewall. 

The tool's most valuable feature is its management console. 

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security needs to improve the management of the actual firewalls. Improvement is also needed for the consolidated UI of different security aspects. 

I have been using the product for a year and a half. My company has been using it for eight years. 

We recently had some issues with stability, so it's hit or miss. It seems to have more minor bugs than other platforms, but overall stability is the same.

The speed of the support's response varies. Sometimes, you can get a good engineer who can give you the right answers. 

Neutral

I have used Cisco, Fortinet, Palo Alto, and SonicWall. The worst ones on the list are Cisco, Fortinet, and SonicWall. Palo Alto is better in some areas. Check PointCloudGuard Network Security is top in terms of actual security. But in terms of managing the whole platform, I would put it below Palo Alto.

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security's deployment is easy and takes two hours to complete. 

I did the solution's deployment myself. However, I connected with the consultants whenever needed. 

We've been secure and haven't had any security breaches.

The tool's pricing is been higher than other solutions, but it seems like it's turning downwards.

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten. 

We primarily use it for egress internet traffic for four clouds, as well as between clouds to on-prem. Those are the main use cases. We have another small use case for ingress traffic, but it is a very small use case right now.

By implementing CloudGuard Network Security, we wanted to get network visibility in our clouds. That was the main point. We also wanted to provide a segregation layer with stateful inspection with all the next-generation features, such as IPS.

CloudGuard Network Security certainly has made our organization more secure. Our business partners cannot inadvertently open up the access that they should not be just to get things done. They now have to go through our firewall. We have got the inspection layer. Our security organization can see threats if they come in and take action on them. We were able to realize its benefits almost instantly.

CloudGuard Network Security provides unified security management across hybrid-clouds as well as on-prem. We heavily use global policy to join on-prem and the cloud, as well as multiple clouds. It is a huge benefit for us as we can set a global standard for policy and then push that across all the different security zones.

We are very confident in our cloud network's security. We have had many years of experience developing it, so we were very aware of the design and the solution within each cloud. We are confident with how we deploy it, and we have plans to make it more efficient as we go.

Most recently, it would be the dynamic objects or datacenter objects. The query feature is going to be a game-changer for us as we move forward. It simplifies our policy, and it gives us a way to dynamically learn and discover things in the cloud instead of having a static way.

Currently, we are struggling with licensing just because of the pace and growth of our cloud. Keeping up with licensing for new regions and new gateway usage is certainly something we are looking into. We are working with our accounting to figure out how we can improve. The licensing piece is big for us.

We are at the place where we are looking at better integration with the management system. We use an MDS today, and it is self-deployed. We want to get to the Smart-1 Cloud, but we do not know what that looks like today because it does not support a multi-domain setup. Smart-1 should either be able to do multi-domain or there should be some form of taking a multi-domain environment and putting it in Smart-1.

I have been using CloudGuard Network Security for probably five years.

From our experience in five years, it has been very stable.

It seems to be very scalable. We have plans to increase the usage of CloudGuard Network Security.

We do scale sets across our clouds and across many regions globally. The number of applications behind it is in the hundreds if not thousands.

It is an excellent service. I would rate their support a nine out of ten. Improving a little bit in the smaller clouds such as Oracle and Google would help a lot.

Positive

We did not specifically use any similar solution in the cloud. It was brand new.

We have a public cloud and then a hybrid with on-prem. We have AWS, Azure, Google, and Oracle.

In terms of the version, on-prem, we use Maestro, and in the cloud, we use the latest CloudGuard. We use the software version R80.40 and are about to upgrade to R81.20.

Its deployment was a little complex for us because we have a very large cloud environment and we are multi-cloud. We had an existing estate, so it was hard to put a firewall in the path and not break things.

We are still implementing it because we are taking a cloud-by-cloud approach. We have done AWS and Azure. It took probably two years to do that, so I would assume that for Google and Oracle, it is going to take at least a year.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we first develop the IEC for the code to deploy it, and then we deploy it and test it in a sandbox environment. We then deploy it to non-prod and roll it out to those regions, and after that, we would do the same with prod.

We implemented it ourselves.

We have seen an ROI, but I do not have any metrics.

Pricing-wise, it is pretty competitive. However, I would like to see more flexible licensing. There should be more of a consume what you need and true-up type of model.

In the past, we have evaluated other solutions. When we tested them, they did not have the same feature set or functionality that CloudGuard had. When I initially tested years ago, the scaling probably was not as efficient. The support was also a big factor. The support that we got from those vendors was not as good as from our account team with Check Point. 

When we looked at the cloud provider firewalls, they did not match up to what Check Point could do with the various deep packet features and functions like IPS. The feature set was the main difference. At the time, the cloud providers could not provide IPS or deep packet features. That was a big driver for us with Check Point. The fact that we could not integrate policy with our on-prem firewalls, which were from Check Point, was another big driver because we wanted a unified policy. Our existing relationship with Check Point helped as well.

To those evaluating CloudGuard Network Security, I would advise certainly engaging with the Check Point account team. Get their solutions team to help you walk through the solution and talk to others in the industry about their experiences.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is to deploy it as soon as you can in your cloud journey.

I would rate CloudGuard Network Security a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use CloudGuard Network Security to deploy cloud firewalls in Azure, safeguarding our applications, and managing them using Terraform.

CloudGuard Network Security streamlines processes by automating tasks, reducing human effort, and enhancing security for cloud deployments.

The most valuable features are the ease of administration with the cloud management extension and the cloud licensing model.

I have been using CloudGuard Network Security for about four months.

We haven't had any stability issues so far.

Scalability has been great. We utilize scale sets, deploying two gateways per region with settings ranging from two to ten.

The initial deployment using the ARM template in Azure was straightforward, but migrating to Terraform added complexity, although we managed to make it work.

Our existing Check Point discounts make the licensing competitive and budget-friendly.

CloudGuard provides unified security management across hybrid clouds and on-premises environments.

Unified security management simplifies our operations by centralizing logging and integrating seamlessly with our existing solutions, ensuring security teams have a single point of reference without needing additional configurations.

My advice would be to consider the solution as it performs well and seamlessly integrates with existing systems, streamlining processes and proving to be highly beneficial.

Overall, I would rate CloudGuard Network Securit as an eight out of ten.

When we began our digital transformation, we had already invested in on-premises Check Point firewalls. We desired the same level of security in the cloud along with the elasticity that the cloud demands.

We have a standard security policy across the organization. Our layered security, including North-South and East-West firewalls, is fantastic.

Compared to the other solutions for identity-based threat detection, the malware and threat prevention capabilities are key features that we have enabled – we actually use all the available features. 

On several occasions, we've benefited from zero-day protection. It acts immediately when something is discovered, while other solutions might take much longer to react.

I'm confident that as long as we keep up with the advancements that Check Point continues to make, our security posture is in good hands.

The virtual machine scale sets were crucial, offering the ability to scale up and down. 

It was very easy to install the solution, and the architecture meant we didn't have to worry about exceeding the solution's capacity.

CloudGuard Network Security provides unified security management across our cloud and on-premises environments.

We integrate our management servers with the Check Point Multi-Domain Security Management server. This allows it to interact with Check Point CASB and our SIEM. As alerts arise, we're able to triage them effectively.

In future releases, I would like to see the data loss prevention (DLP) feature could scale along with the virtual machine scale sets.

I've been using CloudGuard Network Security since approximately 2019.

The overall stability is there. Our firewalls monitor our most crucial systems. If those firewalls went down, it would take out almost our entire cloud network.

The scalability is great. 

We have Check Point's Diamond support, and they have been fantastic. It's a true partnership, and we always work together to find solutions for anything that's needed.

We have weekly meetings with our sales team, our architecture team, and their team. They are truly integrated as part of our organization.

Positive

We had our native cloud firewall. Our native cloud firewalls lacked intrusion prevention and advanced malware protection. 

They offered basic stateful firewalling, and we wanted a more robust solution for our security needs.

When we designed our cloud architecture, Check Point was the primary solution we chose.

It's simple to set up and easy to tear down or upgrade. This provides us with a lot of flexibility in testing.

We did evaluate other solutions. We evaluated other web application firewalls (WAFs). 

The ease of use is great. Creating firewalls within templates is straightforward. 

The overall depth of features within the solution is one of the key reasons why we chose Check Point as a long-term partner.

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

Our primary use case is for segmentation and next-generation protection. 

Our clients choose CloudGuard as a natural progression of their solutions. They understand Microsoft and CloudGuard fits. They are vendor-oriented. They stick with Microsoft. They have a lot of experience with Check Point and this fits in. 

Check Point Management is the best and Azure management is also very good. It's simple and has high security. There are no additional costs which is one of the advantages. 

Compared to other solutions, CloudGuard is easier to use. 

I don't see much need for improvement. 

In Czech, we are a little behind the USA and Germany so we have matured in our mentality to move towards the cloud. 

Check Point could show us use cases that would help us in Czech and could help us with security threats in our specific country.

The level of confidence our clients have in their cloud network security using CloudGuard Network Security depends. Some are very confident but some are worried about information being exploited. When compared to other vendors, CloudGuard is the best when it comes to threat protection.

I have been implementing CloudGuard for our clients for four years. 

It's stable.

It scales well for our clients' needs. We have deployed over 2,000 servers.

Support is good for CloudGuard. It could depend on the support person who is helping us. Different regions offer different levels of support. Israel and US offer the best support.

Positive

It's easy for me to deploy. 

Every project needs different pricing. I believe that when we talk with the particular guys, we will find a price for the customer. They are flexible in terms of that because we need to be flexible, and we have many companies who are aggressive with discounts. 

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. 

We utilize CloudGuard Network Security as virtual appliances deployed within virtual machines, acting as firewalls at the perimeter of our data center in QSaver. These virtual appliances safeguard all internet access originating from the virtual machines at our factory in Curitiba, Brazil.

The challenges we sought to tackle through the implementation of CloudGuard Network Security were to ensure the protection of our servers against threats and attempts to breach them via internet-facing avenues.

We found it advantageous due to its ease of implementation and use. There were no delays in receiving customer devices, which enhances security within the environment.

We enjoy all the benefits typically associated with physical appliances, even while utilizing virtual machines. Although it took some time for customers to fully grasp the benefits, as they weren't immediately clear, over time, they began to recognize the value it brings to their security infrastructure.

It offers us unified security management across hybrid CloudGuard deployments, as well as on-premises. The option to manage it bridges physical devices onto the data center. With consolidated logs accessible on the same management interface, it becomes highly convenient and straightforward to operate.

Comparing CloudGuard's network security to other solutions in terms of ease of use is challenging. Additionally, since we're already utilizing Check Point solutions, integrating it with hardware network security proves to be very straightforward and user-friendly.

We have a high level of confidence in the effectiveness of CloudGuard Network Security.

The SSL spectrum proved to be the most valuable for our incoming connections. This feature enabled us, for instance, to successfully prevent Log4J attack attempts.

New features have been introduced recently, but they have not yet been integrated into CloudGuard Vsec. It would be advantageous to have them implemented as they would improve the performance.

I have been using it for three years.

It provides excellent stability capabilities.

It offers good scalability abilities. We have a plan to increase the utilization of CloudGuard Network Security and its services in the future.

I am satisfied with the customer service and support provided. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Positive

In our deployment environment, each instance is strategically positioned at the forefront of the web servers within the data center, effectively serving its purpose. Specifically, it functions to regulate internet access for the servers and manage inbound connections from internet customers to the servers.

It's remarkably easy to deploy, by far the simplest. For instance, it only took us a few minutes to transition to production. This capability is incredibly beneficial, as it allows us to swiftly assist customers during emergencies by deploying a firewall and addressing any threats they may encounter.

Determining the return on investment can be challenging; however, we've observed other companies operating in the same sector with similar approaches. Despite encountering attacks, we have yet to experience any incidents. This absence of incidents serves as a metric for us, indicating the reliability of our alternative solution.

The pricing is highly competitive and advantageous, offering great value.

I recommend others to give it a try because of its simplicity in deployment, scalability, and usability. Overall, I would rate it ten out of ten.