What is our primary use case?
We use SandBlast Mobile to secure our BYOD devices for employees that want to have access to corporate information, as we require them to have SandBlast in order to do that. It is always monitoring their text messages for malicious stuff or their apps, to see if there's anything malicious, and then we receive the logging and alerts so we are able to react and take care of our users' security.
How has it helped my organization?
I don't know if it improved any functions for us besides just securing devices. Previously, we had nothing securing our mobile devices and we just trusted the users to be smart on their phones, and now we have that solution so it's able to help protect those phones and let us know if their software's really out of date and information like that.
It has stopped about five phishing attacks on mobiles in the last month.
What is most valuable?
I would say the most valuable aspect is just the offering itself. We don't have a lot of offerings out there in the mobile world right now to put on cell phones and they filled that gap. Having a really good security control on a mobile device is its greatest asset.
The protection provided by this solution for all three threat vectors, application, network, and device is really good. It's in-depth on all accounts.
It monitors all the URLs that a user goes to on their phone so we can see what they're looking at and we can limit it. Certain topics are not allowed to be accessed. They're monitoring their apps and they rate them based upon how big of a security risk that individual app is based on their ratings. And so we're able to limit apps as well and allow people to have some that may be a low risk, but still a risk, but we may allow that for our users whereas we block medium and high risk.
The device itself checks to see if the device is jailbroken yet and so that's a good security control they have. It also watches your SMS text messages for phishing so that's another way it's securing the device.
The detection and prevention mechanisms seem very accurate. I remember about a year and a half ago, there was an app that had been found to be malicious, it instantly switched its rating, and was reacting to that change in the vulnerability of that app rather swiftly so it seems to be very accurate and in-depth.
It's super comprehensive. The networking part watches all of its networking and it does a man in the middle attack to be able to see that, but it is extremely comprehensive in being able to see everything that the phone is doing network-wise.
It has a pretty good dashboard. You can maneuver around it quickly and be able to see what you want to see and get to the information you need.
The ease of use is good. It does allow you to send email alerts and I get email alerts when something's going on so I don't have to be watching it all the time and then I'm able to go and work with that user to resolve it. It seems to be a pretty well-built tool.
I haven't seen many false positives, they've all seemed to be pretty accurate.
What needs improvement?
Integration needs improvement. We use Check Point for email. We use Check Point Capsule Workspace and I wish that it tied into that better and was integrated with their email application so that when it's secure, then they're able to access their email and it could be deployed as one group instead of two separate applications. It's a little bit more work for us to deploy both of those so it'd be nice if they could be integrated.
With that, I think that having the functionality of being able to test the URL would be an improvement. For example, if you had an email with a URL address in it, you can copy and paste it in there and it can test it and tell you if it's a safe site or something like that.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Check Point SandBlast Mobile for three years.
We are using the cloud for its management. It's hosted by Check Point.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It seems to be very stable, I haven't seen any outages in it.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Being hosted by Check Point, scalability hasn't really been a big concern. It seems to be handling all the devices we've added. We have a very small company so I don't know as far as how it would fit a huge company, but for us, it's been great.
There are fifty users in my company.
How are customer service and technical support?
I have not used their technical support for this solution.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was pretty straightforward. Setting up individual networking is a little bit more complex besides depending on how granular your organization uses it, but for us, it was pretty straightforward.
The installation of the solution on end-user mobile devices was not complex. It's straightforward. It's very simple. Our end-users are able to install it themselves, we don't have to really be involved in that process so they're able to do it without help from IT for the most part. That is super helpful to not have to handhold as an IT team all of our users, they can just do it and it works.
There is no enforcement mechanism that depends on the user if they installed it or not. We don't enforce it in that way, but we do enforce it based upon if they want to have email access. We require them to have it so we validate that it's installed before we install email, but we don't enforce it.
There was definitely concern from end-users about their privacy. Especially with the networking part, the way that it's able to see everywhere they go is a big security and privacy issue. We addressed it by not requiring all our users to have it, but if they want to email, they have to have it and so that's how we ended up getting around it. We had people that ended up using a company phone and a personal phone separately because of it.
The deployment is still in process actually, but that's mostly on our end, not really Check Point's end. We don't have all the policies in place to have that process set forth of how we're doing it so we're still kind of working on that.
In terms of our implementation strategy, as of right now, we have emails set up on people's devices using a different application. That application is no longer working and so as users want email, we implement it, but we aren't pushing users to have email on their phone. And I think in the future that's going to be the case, but right now it's not because we don't have company policies in place for that.
I'm responsible for the deployment and maintenance and I'm a system administrator.
What was our ROI?
Our ROI has been great. It really didn't come at a cost for us because we already had the Infinity in place so, at no cost, we had extra security benefits added and visibility into our users' devices that we didn't have before.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
As we didn't really compare it with competitors, we bought it as part of our Infinity and so it was included with our other network security. It was basically no cost to us because we were already planning on using the other features of it. It was just an added part of that contract, but I don't have much input beyond that. We didn't compare to anyone else or anything like that.
What other advice do I have?
Having Check Point, at least for us, they implemented two different hosted platforms so that we could have different policies for different users, and that was really helpful to us because we did have privacy concerns from a lot of users. We were able to lock down the network on some devices and other devices we didn't monitor the network.
I would rate it a nine out of ten. It's really in-depth for what it does.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
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