Check Point Harmony Mobile Reviews

This solution is required for one of the internal needs of our organization. We need the product based on our need for the control of access to corporate resources. We were looking for a solution that allows us to generate the management of mobile network devices and something that could secure all systems in the best way possible, thus giving us a solution that allows for general device management. With this product, our organization will be able to monitor and control the devices used by each of our employees in the organization, which gives us an level of adequate security configuration and allows us to comply with internal policies.

As a security solution for devices, it can benefit us in many ways, including providing us with data security, access control, network security, and more. The kinds of features on offer provide us with confidential access to information, ensuring each of the different devices is protected while improving the productivity of employees. In summary, this solution can help us protect business resources in the best way possible, which can be translated into efficient and profitable security.

A very important feature that is outstanding and helps our organization is the ability to protect the business data stored on each device. This is especially important since these devices are used to create information, catalogs, products, customer information, and inventory. Every time they are outside the company, the solution provides us with a secure connection from the devices to the database, thereby keeping data safe. In addition, we can improve the productivity of each of the employees remotely. This benefits to the company in terms of sales or productivity even from different locations. 

One thing that should be improved in the future of the ability to ensure that mobile devices are protected from connections in environments with unlimited connectivity. 

In some cases, devices may be found in areas with little or no signal, which can make it difficult to connect to the network. That makes it difficult to use the solution. We ned to ensue we have something that allows users to work effectively even without a strong network connection. This would allow us to have a solution that adapts to the challenged presented by limited connection environments.

I've used the solution for one year.

We are following the necessary activities and communicating with the client. Check Point Harmony Mobile offers significant benefits, such as enhancing its security. The client is proud to use Harmony Mobile, which has improved their overall security posture.

The user-friendly graphical interface makes it easy to interact with Harmony Mobile. Its simplicity allows for smooth engagement with the platform.

I have been using Check Point Harmony Mobile for six or seven months.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

It is scalable.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

Check Point support has been incredible. As soon as we create the tag, we can have an engineer to support us.

Positive

They are choosing Harmony Mobile over other vendors due to its effective blocking capabilities for threats like phishing and malware. Harmony Mobile offers these features at a lower cost than competitors like Palo Alto, Cisco, and Fortinet. Given its competitive pricing and comprehensive features, we encourage other financial institutions to adopt Harmony Mobile for enhanced security.

The integration process is smooth and straightforward, with no difficulties, even on my new tech phone. It also integrates well with third-party systems. The installation is simple, and our professional service team is there to assist with setting up Harmony Mobile

One of our clients has committed to deploying these features. We are working on deploying Check Point Harmony Mobile and preparing a proposal for the bank. Once they accept, we can proceed, which will enhance Harmony Mobile's security features.

Clients are very impressed with Harmony Mobile's threat intelligence capabilities, especially the live, real-time updates. The bank's administrators were particularly amazed by the features of advanced threat intelligence. Harmony Mobile adds numerous security features and simplifies the work for both administrative and security staff.

Due to its significant benefits, we encourage other microfinance and financial institutions to adopt this technology. By deploying Harmony Mobile, they gain enhanced security, reduced workload, and overall efficiency, all at a lower cost than other solutions. The technology is proving to be both valuable and cost-effective for users.

We recommend that financial institutions use Harmony Mobile because it is highly effective in blocking threats like phishing and malware, which are significant concerns in today's market. Financial institutions are major targets for these attacks, so Harmony Mobile's specialized features are precious. We are encouraging them to adopt this solution for enhanced security.

Two engineers are enough for the solution's maintenance.

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

Our primary use case for the product is to secure corporate mobile devices, particularly those containing critical information or used by VIPs within our organization.

The platform's app scanning feature is valuable as it checks app reliability and identifies potential security risks, which is crucial for maintaining secure mobile environments.

The solution's false positive detection could be improved to reduce unnecessary alerts, the app's performance optimized to minimize device impact, and policy management simplified for easier deployment.

I have been using Check Point Harmony Mobile for approximately one and a half years.

The platform is scalable for larger organizations, but customization complexities in policy management can make deployment more challenging for extensive device quantity.

We used other security solutions previously but switched to Check Point Harmony Mobile due to its comprehensive feature set and reputation for effective mobile security.

The setup was relatively straightforward but could be challenging for less technically inclined users due to policy customization requirements.

We implemented the product with the help of our internal team, leveraging our cybersecurity and mobile device management expertise.

The improved security and reduced maintenance overhead contribute to a positive return on investment for our organization.

The product pricing is reasonable for the security it provides. 

We evaluated several alternatives, including SentinelOne and CrowdStrike, but ultimately chose Harmony Mobile for its robust security features and ease of deployment.

Harmony Mobile has significantly enhanced our mobile device security by effectively scanning apps for reliability, monitoring network connections for threats, and ensuring data protection.

It has been a reliable solution for our organization, significantly improving our mobile device security without excessive maintenance requirements.

I rate it a nine out of ten. 

One reason we use it is that we didn't really have any control on the mobile side. We do have Google MDM, but we didn't have a solution like the one Check Point offers to protect mobile devices. Even with Google MDM, there is not much we can do without having something that can enforce security on the endpoint. So there was a gap and that security gap was our main use case.

The mobile space was pretty new to us. We had no control over it. Given the COVID situation and worked-from-home, we immediately embarked on this project to roll out this initiative. It was part of our strategic decision because when the government implemented work-from-home, only essential staff were supposed to come to work. We had to report every stage at which we reduced the number of staff on premises, because we're state-owned and our CEO reports to the minister. The solution improved things significantly in that context. We were able to give a proper accounting of our security assets and not have that gap where mobile devices are concerned. And we're able to offer a lot more security.

A lot of the users are using banking apps and didn't really have any assurance that they were protected. Also, with the pandemic there were a lot more cyber security attacks. We were sending out updates on what was happening, as part of our security awareness. It helped build some confidence within the staff in terms of what we were doing for our security campaign. Overall, it helped us account for all assets and protect them properly.

We like the URL content filtering, that is one of the most valuable features. 

It also enables us to see where privacy is a concern, apps that are leaking privacy. Having an idea of how these apps are being protected offers some level of security to the device and back into our corporate network.

The protection provided by the solution for all three threat vectors, application, network, and device, is pretty okay the way they're doing it. Their solution does not work the traditional way that endpoints used to be protected using local resources, when it's doing its scan. Sandblast is comparing the app to the app store and that is a very good feature. It's not resource-intensive. In terms of the networking, it does a pretty okay job. From the device side, we're able to see that backend information, including the app information, into the portal itself. 

It's also very easy to deploy and easy to manage.

When it comes to applications and network specifically, the solution's comprehensiveness and accuracy is pretty good. For applications, it has features pertaining to things like GDPR compliance. It is not leaking an end-user's personal information. There are some good features there. The only way we are able to see a user being identified is if there is a threat. Then that user comes up in that report, but that's only for those incidents. It's a very small minority. But it does a very good job in terms of breadth of protection.

The dashboard is pretty okay in terms of how you go in and you create your policies. And it comes with a very comprehensive policy. You have checkboxes or radio buttons to select the additional features. That's very intuitive. They just recently added some new features to their dashboard as well. It's pretty straightforward when it comes to where you: 

• look for the threats, versus the administration aspect of it 
• how do you drill down, the analytics
• if there are any events, how you go all the way down. 

I find the dashboard is pretty intuitive and simple, compared to how Check Point has been deploying the SmartConsole.

And when it comes to blocking attempted attacks it's also pretty intuitive and simple. Suppose we see an app that has a particular threat. We're able to select and apply policies or rules on that particular app or device, and that can prevent the threat from propagating. We can quarantine it and address the issue. It's pretty simple in being able to manage threats, from a mobile perspective.

This is the first time we have ventured into protection of mobile devices. We have had many years where staff didn't have any restrictions on a mobile device. Since the migration from the BlackBerry Bell solution that we had back then, there has been a gap. Nobody was able to protect Android as well as iOS devices. And given that we were going into that space, we did not go in with the ability to do any serious lockdown or removal of apps. Mobile threat defense is not supported fully for Google MDM, so we're not using it within the Google MDM. It was supposed to be supported as of this month. We don't have Google MDM being supported by the solution as of yet.

It is a feature requirement, but they wrote me saying it was supposed to have been rolled out at the end of the second quarter of 2020, which would have been in the last month. We should have had something coming back from them so I wrote them last week, asking them where we are in terms of this roadmap. They are aware that it is something that I need.

My objective is to be able to have the MDM integration and to have some level of control over the asset itself.

Also, the one thing I don't see with it is that when I'm doing a scan on my network I'm not seeing my SSI ID showing up. I don't know if that means there's a bug or something we need to work out. But it's still giving me a good report in terms of the network scan and the device protection.

Another thing I would really like to see is a unified console where I don't have to use multiple devices or multiple consoles to manage my Check Point solutions. I am thinking of a unified console that could be linked back with some of the other solutions that we already have from Check Point, like CloudGuard. For all of the on-prem firewalls that we have, there would be one console, as opposed to these multiple consoles, and we would be able to link on-prem and cloud solutions to create that hybrid scenario. I haven't seen that feature yet.

I would also like to see support for other SIEM solutions such as Splunk.

We started with Check Point SandBlast Mobile just when the pandemic lockdown started here in Trinidad, which was in early March, so it's been about six months. During that period of time, when the pandemic kicked in, and remote work and work from home and BYOD were a big concern, that is when we migrated to the SandBlast Mobile platform.

We haven't had any challenges due to somebody complaining of the app crashing. I also have it on my phone and it hasn't crashed. I haven't had a challenge where it prevented me from doing anything. In fact, I was running SandBlast Mobile alongside ZoneAlarm, the free version. I had ZoneAlarm installed about six months prior to installing the SandBlast Mobile agent and both of them worked alongside each other. I never had a problem. I eventually removed the free version and I use the corporate solution.

We haven't really explored the MDM integration yet, nor the other use cases we can use it for. At this moment, we're just looking to protect the mobile handset. There's not much of a use case in terms of how we can scale it. We're still under our license limitation so we're pretty okay with it so far.

From the last report about number of users, we rolled out to about 300 endpoints and we still had about 90 handsets that had not accepted the install. We continue to add more every month to that list. The users include executives and senior managers from the various technology groups, as well as users outside of technology in finance, sales, and marketing. We have had staff from every one of those areas install the solution.

We're 2,400 staff in total and we have only purchased about 350 licenses. We plan to roll this out in phases to the other staff. The challenge that we're having internally is differentiating issued handsets. Initially, we were told to roll this out to everybody, but after some discussions we decided we didn't want to go that hard with the users. So the users that have it installed will run it for about a year and then we can then roll it out to the others. That way, the others will see that the users haven't really had any challenges or any concerns with privacy, or that it slowed down the phone in any way. So we do plan to extend SandBlast to the other staff that don't have it.

Also, being a telecom company, our GM for mobile has been looking at a business model where we would lease phones to our subscribers. In that scenario we would have the solution provisioned and the security installed, given that this is our handset and, at the end of the lease, we would want to recoup some level of monetary value from it. So we would protect it with the assurance that there would be no data privacy concerns. That is still in discussion.

I haven't had many issues where I have had to contact tech support. I have a very good relationship with the territory manager, and I have met and have a very good relationship with the security engineer assigned to this region.

The tech support and help that I have gotten so far is pretty good. I haven't had any challenges.

We had the BlackBerry Bell solution, but nothing to protect Android and iOS. We had purchased AirWatch from VMware, but AirWatch is not the same as a Check Point's mobile threat defense solution. AirWatch was more of an MDM.

We were kind of forced into the solution with the pandemic scenario. We were in the process of writing a few position papers; there were a few reports that the government had requested from the CEO. So we got a little bit of pressure when COVID kicked in. We had to rush. We were very happy when Check Point reached out to us and said, "You can use our ZoneAlarm free for 90 days and you can deploy it to your customers, your subscribers, and to your family members, during this period of time," owing to the relationship that we had. When we got that, the CTO said, "Well, let's just invest in the Sandblast solution." That's how we ended up transitioning into this and deploying it.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. There were a couple of ways to handle the roll-out. We could send an email with a barcode for the users to install it and there was also an option to send an SMS. They could then install it and it was pretty straightforward.

Prior to that, we sent out a communication explaining that this was what we were embarking on, that it was an executive security initiative. We still had a few calls from users because it was a new area and people were very concerned. We had to keep reassuring the users that we were not spying on them, that we were just protecting the company assets. We explained that it was no different from a laptop or a workstation that the company issued. We had to continually reassure them that it wasn't an issue of privacy. In fact, we told the employees that apps were leaking privacy information and this would turn that off and prevent it from happening.

Initially, there were a lot of concerns about privacy with users saying, "This thing is going to spy on us." But we did not roll it out to every employee's handset. We rolled it out to the company-issued handsets. We took that approach and, at a later date, based on how we run this solution and how we get it to "soak in," we'll move to the other area. But there were a lot of concerns. 

We didn't find any complexity around the installation of the solution on end-user mobile devices. Without the MDM integration, we were not able to force the install and the user still had the option not to install, and if it was installed they still had the option to remove it. But it was straightforward. There weren't any complexities.

Our deployment took about a month or a month-and-a-half. The problem we had wasn't with the roll-out, rather it was about our being able to separate company-issued handsets from the list. We went to the team that issues the handsets and they did not have accurate lists. The audit they had done was a month or two prior so we only had accuracy in the list up to a month or two before. The challenge wasn't about the solution itself.

We didn't use any third-party. We had a demo and we were shown how straightforward it was. It started off from that demo and moved straight into production. They gave us use of it for a period of time. We looked at it, played around with it, and that eventually became our production environment. It wasn't a scenario where we had to engage Professional Services.

Initially, there were about five people from our side involved in the deployment, but it ended up coming down to two to three people.

For maintenance of the solution I have three people who are all IT security specialists.

We have not yet seen any ROI because we still have a number of devices where it has not been installed. We haven't yet seen the big benefits of it.

We got a pretty good deal and the price is pretty decent compared to some of the other solutions.

Check Point has always been a little high on price. People will need to have a good relationship with their territory manager or their account manager and will need to negotiate a better price. 

Compared to some of its competitors who are very good in marketing, Check Point has been very lacking. Their price sometimes tends to be notably higher than its competitors, but the quality of the solution is the difference. However, people mostly go after the marketing. They see that side of it.

For this solution there is just the support. There were no other costs added on to it. It is a straightforward license: unit price by X number of units and the support that goes along with it. There wasn't any other cost for us.

We haven't really looked at any competitors. This type of solution was not something we were planning on doing within this financial year. SandBlast Mobile was not something that was on our radar. Owing to the scenario we were in with the COVID pandemic, the issue was how fast we could react to get to the solution onboard and how little paperwork would be involved. Given that we're a state-owned company, we have to comply with a lot of procurement policies and guidelines. If we don't have a vendor operating onsite, we are not able to leverage any solution from that vendor.

Check Point was already operating onsite; we had other solutions in use from them. Given that they offered a solution to us and had a relationship with our executives, that was what enabled us to fast-track things.

If we were to evaluate other products we would not have been able to roll this out in time. It would have had to go to an RFP, an evaluation process, and a purchase order. It would have been a good six- to nine-month process.

If you have the opportunity, explore competitors to see how their products work. Also, negotiate your price with Check Point as much as possible.

The things that stand out from my experience are the ease of the deployment and the education of the end-user regarding data privacy and those types of things.

We haven't had many cases of false positives. One that we saw was in the following scenario. Let's say we had an app that came up as a threat and we applied particular rules to quarantine it. After we applied the rules, it showed up on the handset as if the app no longer existed, whereas Sandblast was saying that it wasn't removing the app. It turns out it really wasn't removing it. It just removed the app from reporting within the rule itself. That was a little bit of a challenge in wrapping our heads around it. We worked with Check Point to iron out that issue. So that was a kind of false positive.

We had to do it a few times in order to understand that the app was not being removed. The solution claimed to be GDPR compliant and that it was not removing any information or apps from the end-user's handset. We had to check to make sure those features were in place.

Our company works in the area of developing and delivering online gambling platforms. The Check Point Next-Generation Firewalls are the core security solution we use for the protection of our DataCenter environment, located in Asia (Taiwan).

The environment has about 50 physical servers as virtualization hosts, and we have two HA Clusters that consist of 2x5400 hardware appliances, managed by an OpenServer Security Management Server on a Virtual Machine (KVM), all running on R80.10 with the latest JumboHotfix.

The Check Point Mobile Access software blade is one of the numerous blades activated on the NGFWs and serves for providing connectivity to the datacenter for the employees.

The Check Point Mobile Access is activated on the Check Point HA Clusters and protects our datacenter located in Taiwan. It is used to provide connectivity to the internal resource for our employees, thus Remote Access VPN services.

The blade is easy to enable and configure, and it provides great benefits with the help of the built-in SSL VPN Portal. Now, most of our employees don't even use any client software, but just the browsers on their devices, to access the applications published via the SSL VPN Portal.

The connection is stable and reliable, and the level of security and encryption is still high. We find this solution really useful and helpful.

The users in our company like that the VPN client is supported on the different platforms and operational systems, e.g. Android smartphones and tablets, Windows and MacOS PCs and laptops.

The most impressive thing is the SSL VPN Portal. With it, you don't even need any client software, just a browser is enough to connect. We have integrated the SSL VPN Portal with the Microsoft Exchange server, and this covers the needs of 95% of our users regarding remote access to the office.

The authentication is performed via integration with Active Directory, so the employees use the same credentials. It is super easy and everybody likes that.

I think that the pricing for the Check Point products should be reconsidered, as we found it to be quite expensive to purchase and to maintain. Maintenance requires that the licenses and the support services be prolonged regularly.

Alternatively, they should create some additional bundles of the software blades with significant discounts in addition to the current Next Generation Threat Prevention & SandBlast (NGTX) and Next Generation Threat Prevention (NGTP) offers.

We have also had several support cases opened for software issues, but none of them were connected with Check Point Mobile Access.

We have been using this product for about three years, starting in late 2017.

The Check Point Mobile Access software blade is stable.

The Check Point Mobile Access software blade scales well with the gateways we use, since it doesn't affect the overall performance much after activation.

We have had several support cases opened, but none of them were connected with the Check Point Mobile Access Software Blade. Some of the issues were resolved by installing the latest recommended JumoHotfix, whereas some required additional configuration at the OS kernel level.

The longest issue took about one month to be resolved, which we consider too long.

No, we didn't use any SSL VPN solutions before onboarding Check Point Mobile Access.

The setup was straightforward. The configuration was easy and understandable, and we relied heavily on built-in objects and groups.

Our deployment was completed by our in-house team. We have a Check Point Certified engineer working in the engineering team.

Choosing the correct set of licenses is essential because, without the additional software blade licenses, the Check Point gateways are just a stateful firewall.

No, we decided to stick to the Check Point Mobile Access after the demo with the vendor.

The ease of use, along with comprehensive protection for all devices, is a key advantage. It provides visibility into malicious applications installed on the phone.

The product needs to improve its user awareness. 

I have been working with the product for 18 months. 

I rate Check Point Harmony Mobile a nine out of ten. 

I rate Check Point Harmony Mobile's deployment an eight out of ten. 

I rate the tool's pricing a three out of ten. 

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

We used the solution to provide mobile threat defense for mobile devices (predominantly Apple iPhone/iPad). We evaluated numerous solutions from competitors including IBM, Better Mobile, Trend Micro, and others. Check Point is attractive since they are a market-leading firewall vendor and therefore we trust their filtering in terms of web and link protection beyond others who may rely on smaller or third-party feeds. We also found that the breadth of protections including app analysis and WiFi spoofing validation were helpful.

The solution was easy to deploy and provided a useful security enhancement for mobile devices. It allowed us to extend filtering technologies that we would generally expect to be available within an edge firewall to mobile devices - such as web content filtering and URL protection. With the prevalence of mobile phishing (including SMS phish which circumvents email filters), we felt that this was a useful security layer. Check Point is also a provider that we felt we could trust when adding products to our security stack.

The integration with Microsoft Intune scoped to the security group made deployment a breeze. Certainly, once the initial configuration was in place the process was smooth and devices began to appear in the Check Point Harmony portal automatically. Adding web and link protection was considered to be a valuable security enhancement and is a key benefit of using mobile threat defense. The fact that the product can also highlight changes in public IP addresses for known corporate WiFi SSIDs also helps to alert or prevent spoofing of internal WiFi networks.

We had some issues with loopback VPN DNS filtering stopping working periodically, however, this is something that we could probably iron out with support. In the end, we ended up disabling this feature and using Umbrella (which we also use). It is of course highly possible that we could have addressed this with their support team but in our scenario, it was easier to disable the functionality and run with a separate product that we already had available. Certainly, everything else worked fine and the alerts were very useful.

I first used the solution several years ago.

We had no stability issues with the solution save for the periodic VPN loopback internet outages with iOS agents that I'm sure could be resolved with support.

We don't foresee any obvious limits with the scalability of the solution for all but the largest of organizations.

Support engineers were friendly and communicable.

Positive

We had previously trialed better mobile but the minimum onboarding/barrier of entry costs were too steep. We are also more familiar with the Check Point brand. We've also used Trend Micro before yet found the feature set for iOS devices to be slim.

The solution has a straightforward setup - especially with Intune integration.

We did an in-house implementation.

ROI is impossible to compute.

Setup and recurring costs seemed reasonable and in line with other Check Point products.

We did evaluate IBM, Trend Micro, Better Mobile, and others.

The Checkpoint Harmony mobile application is used to protect and eliminate our corporate iPhone users from malicious attempts such as phishing, malware, malicious websites, anti-bots, and harmful applications. Many users receive malicious text messages and emails prompting them for credentials such as corporate active directory details, banking information, or credit card information. It is important to protect our corporate data on all mobile devices by using Check Point's Harmony Mobile Application. 

It has provided us with an easy-to-use solution that protects our corporate data on all our iPhone mobile devices. The easy-to-manage cloud-based management console provides us with details on the scanning status of our devices and reports all risks that are identified on the mobile devices. It is wonderful to be able to customize the many policies in order for the application to work at it's best for our corporate environment. The scalability has provided us with much protection and flexibility - and that is what we definitely need. 

The zero-touch deployment system process has been the most valuable feature thus far. The ability to deploy and configure the application with the help of Microsoft's Endpoint Management (our mobile device management solution) has been seamless and has given us the ability to deploy with zero user interaction. 

The other most valuable service so far has been the assistance provided to us by the Check Point Harmony mobile engineers. They have been so awesome and helpful to us during the setup process. 

The area that I find could use the most improvement would be in the forensics section of the administrator console. It would be super helpful if there were more details around the risks that were found on our mobile devices. A simple click to find out more information would be excellent. Also, a reporting option would be beneficial as well. Maybe the option to send an email to the administrators when a high-risk vulnerability is found and also the option to run a monthly report to send to administrators would be great. 

I've used the solution for about 4 months.

The solution is very stable; we have not had any connection issues with the devices reporting into the admin console. 

The options to customize the policies are very beneficial.

Technical support is great. All have excellent customer service skills and stellar technical abilities.

We previously did not have a solution in place. 

The initial setup was straightforward and the documentation was excellent. 

We did an in-house implementation with support from engineers. 

In terms of ROI, we do not know this yet. 

I'd advise new users to be sure to get all information about the cost and licensing first. 

No, we did not evaluate other options first.