Check Point Harmony SASE (formerly Perimeter 81) Reviews

The primary use case has to do with the remote connectivity of sites.

I have found the IPsec VPN to be valuable.

The integration from a management perspective could be improved so that the management can, from an existing Check Point firewall, manage a Harmony firewall through one pane of glass.

I would like to see the use of either GRE or non-IP tunnels in the next release.

I've been working with Harmony Connect for about 18 months. I tested it but did not run it in production.

Stability wise, I'd rate Harmony Connect at seven out of ten. It could be more stable in some respects.

The scalability is good, and I'd give it an eight out of ten.

I found the technical support to be okay. Most of the technical support was geared to the regular equipment, and we had to find specialists within Check Point to look at Harmony Connect. Because of that, I would give technical support a rating of seven out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is simple in some ways but complex in other ways. You need to know a lot about the Check Point side and the portal side to make it work.

I would rate Harmony Connect's pricing at six out of ten. It wasn't particularly expensive, but it wasn't super cheap either.

We evaluated Silver Peak. Comprehensiveness was the main difference between Harmony Connect and Silver Peak. Harmony Connect is a little more suited for smaller branch offices as opposed to full-site connectivity.

Overall, I would rate this solution at seven on a scale from one to ten.

For the past two months, we have been evaluating Harmony Connect because it has some limitations on routing and account control, so we are testing it for three customers to check this function. In some areas, Harmony Connect can replace older VPN products and also add some features, like DRP and security gateway.

The DLP (Data Loss Protection) is the most valuable feature. 

My customers want more remote functionality.  They need another routing option after they connect to the enterprise intranet. For example, let's say a user tries to connect to a remote branch office and headquarters through Harmony Connect. They need a local breakout after connecting to the headquarters, especially in China. They need to put local breakout in the Chinese internet. The current version cannot do something like this.

This solution is new to Taiwan, so I haven't been using it for very long. I started using Harmony Connect in Q3 2022.  

Harmony Connect has been stable so far, but this is still a test. 

There are some limitations on redundancy, and it takes about 30 minutes to switch. This is a significant limitation. Competitors like Palo Alto can do it in around five minutes. It's more appropriate for enterprises because they sell the product license in packages of 50 accounts at least.

I rate Check Point customer service nine out of 10. It is excellent, especially on the customer side. 

Positive

Check Point Taiwan provides me with a lot of flexibility in pricing. If I'm trying to secure a customer, they can give me a good discount on this product. The price is about 350 HKD annually. 

I rate Check Point Harmony Connect eight out of 10.

We use the solution as an endpoint protection platform, which supports the next-generation antivirus. It offers endpoint detection and response and will help on addressing a single agent that will support multiple features. 

This helps IT Security operations front to minimize the security threats. Also, we can map the MITRE ATT&CK framework in a single dashboard which provides complete endpoint device visibility.

The solution offers runtime protection against ransomware, malware, and file-less attacks, with instant and full remediation features that give good insights into the organization's threat landscape.

The unified agent helps in addressing the system usage. Instead of installing different agents and real-time protection, the platform provides greater visibility to the operation team to see incidents in real-time, instead of creating a lot of false positives. The vaulted space features give more controls on signed processes. In case the malware attempts to perform a shadow copy deletion, the machine will not lose any data. We can also take a backup of the file.

Phishing protection gives good insights about credential theft and zero phishing.

Overall, the unified agent covers endpoints as well as prevents web browser attacks.

Phishing sites are blocked in real-time and protect against previously unknown phishing sites and corporate credential re-use. This will prevent the business end-user from being compromised by attacks.

Zero-day sandboxing is an additional feature that can provide greater visibility on the sandboxing end and gives more control on the threat front. We can sanitize the files if we want, using a threat extraction process with infected files that can be cleaned in the process and provides a safe environment.

The remote browser isolation is not part of the unified agent, as of now. It could protect more on threat intel sources and could give a broader view of threat hunting. 

Soon, the unified agent should take more CPU processing in the systems-deployed Check Point agent. 

Providing USB control in a Linux environment will give more control over data security. Few other OEMs provide Linux USB control. If Check Point could adopt the technology in near future, it would give more of a value add to existing customers. 

I've used the solution for more than six months. We are using the Check Point Harmony end point solution.

We switched in order to avoid multiple agents.

Pricing is purely based on their industry and company decisions.

We did look at the Sentinel product.

This tool is of great help and allows us to provide security assistance to our users who work remotely. They connect from any site, secure or insecure, accessing applications and business email without protection as they are outside the company perimeter.

It gives us granular security through web control policies, reports, and monitoring. We manage to avoid user vulnerabilities from anywhere. It is managed with Harmony Connect in the Check Point Infinity Portal, a very good tool.

Users are quite happy with the applied security performance.

Check Point Harmony Connect has improved the protection of computers outside the office. It offers implementation that is simple. 

Also, with the monitoring dashboard, we can make decisions to improve the control policies and web access so that we can better protect our teams.

This tool does not require being on the same network. Everything is verified thanks to a small Check Point protection agent that is installed on the client.

Protection against threats like ransomware is very effective.

We really liked the Check Point Harmony Connect tool and the monitoring, since we can make the right decisions thanks to the records observed in a simple way through the dashboard. The portal is really very intuitive.

The policies applied to users are quite granular, which helps a lot with the differential protection of users, generating managerial profiles and normal profiles efficiently.

We have also put VPNs into practice through harmony connect, having secure user connectivity. It is a very robust, modern, and secure tool.

They should include the ease of implementation or installation of the agent through an Excel list, where all the users can be loaded and added to be able to send the agent by mail.

I would also like it if they could include more documentation from the manufacturer to be able to implement it more efficiently and follow all the best practices.

Regarding the support, the schedules can be improved since they are generally in another geographical area, and it is difficult to solve the problems with the time differences between them and us.

We have been using this tool for approximately two years now. It is an excellent security tool to protect telecommuting users.

This is an excellent cloud-managed Check Point tool; no server is required.

Problems are always solved, however, with modern security applications, specifically those that are in the Check Point Infinity Portal, it is a little more difficult to solve with support.

Neutral

We have not had a modern solution like this before. Check Point has innovated our processes.

It is important to associate you company with a partner who can work with prices and documentation in order to find the security application that best suits the company's requirements.

Before acquiring any company-level security tool, we undertake the task of investigating several solutions. In this case, Check Point was the best.

All Harmony solutions are excellent. I really recommend this option.

Check Point Harmony Connect is a modern security tool from the prestigious brand that helps us provide web filter or web gateway security to our employees, from the office or anywhere they can be covered with the security of this application.

It is a tool with great potential. It gave us access to security and user control to enhance productivity.

In the company, we are pleased with the functionalities and benefits provided by Check Point Harmony Connect. It is an excellent option and an excellent tool.

It helps us daily with access and restrictions due to business policies, generating access and restriction profiles, we have guaranteed greater productivity and better security for the institution's teams.

This has helped mitigate the latest attacks, malware, and even ransomware that are all too common these days.

Thanks to this tool, we managed to solve all these vulnerabilities quickly. It offers a clean implementation and a Check Point agent that does not cause any concern at the level of requirements on the server.

There are too many positive things that I could mention. Some of them are more impressive than others, however, the best include: 

• The ease of implementation. It offers easy steps for the implementation of security tools, all through a web portal (Infinity Portal from Check Point).
• It has comfortable licensing. It adapts per user and really for all the functionalities they are of great value. It is worth implementing and acquiring.
• The monitoring and granular policies are very helpful. We can generate site blocking policies and specific applications for some user profiles. Monitoring is incredible. It helps decision-making and security improvements in an easy and intuitive way.

Check Point Harmony Connect has basic improvement areas, such as the following:

• In order to be able to invite users, send the agent and implement it, the user input must be generated manually. It would be easier if we could add them automatically via automation.
• The guides for some capabilities are limited or do not represent the reality of the application. It is difficult to find 100% reliable documentation. It is not always possible to perform all the steps due to some problems. Some manuals are not so intuitive.

This is an excellent modern security application. From the web portal, it is easily accessible.

We've used it for more than a year and have been satisfied.

We have not previously used such a complete tool.

Finding a Check Point vendor or partner who can provide you with costs and advice on current tools is best.

We evaluated the requirements of the company. However, after seeing the different options we understood that Check Point is the best option on the market.

I really liked this application. I would recommend it without hesitation.

The solution provides access to our own environments. Our environments are usually restricted by IP from external access, so I cannot access it from a regular internet connection. I can with this product. 

We also have a system in place that allows us to access to our own SSO login for our customer environments, without having to use individual logins for all of our customers. By doing so, we protect our customer environments from external public access, which is vital to our customers - especially in the onboarding phase of the lifecycle.

It helps to quickly get access to the pages I need. 

The overall login experience is seamless and usually also has no issues. I rarely have to restart the service. 

The service offers decent speed without interruptions, which allows me to work and focus without distractions or interruptions to what I am trying to achieve. This is reducing my work stress a lot as switching focus constantly has a negative impact on the quality of our products and services, which would affect our customer sentiment in a negative way.

The tool does offer a single sign-on for businesses. This means that I no longer have to remember a separate, individual password for this tool. Other tools require that, which is a big downside as I used to have to retrieve this password from my mails every time that I attempted to perform a login to the service. 

With single sign-on, the system will automatically detect who I am and which organization I belong to. This speeds up the process and even a restart of the system will not require me to lose time.

There is not much to improve. 

Currently, I am not able to define a different country or location, which can result in negative experiences as the tool is being recognized by websites and this can make it difficult to access them or force me to disable the program temporarily. This could also be solved, however, this issue might be related to the way in which we have set up our current implementation of this service. This does not have to be a global shortcoming when using this service.

We've used the solution for about two years.

The product is very stable so far. We have been connected for 36 hours without issue.

The solution is very scalable; it is easy to add more seats.

Support was quick and able to help with my query.

Positive

The solution’s UI is more user-friendly and has more functions.

The solution is very complicated for new people. The solution could add more connectors.

I have been using Perimeter 81 for two months.

The product is stable.

The solution is scalable. Around 30-40 users are using this solution.

The initial setup is easy. We must first install it on a machine and then access the connection for deployment. If you go with the standard setup, it won’t take much time, but with a database, it takes some time.

The solution is expensive.

The solution’s maintenance is easy. Since the data collector is free, they don’t provide any support. Web filtering is paid, so they provide support for it.

Before you go with the solution, ensure to check the certificate.
Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

I'm using the solution on my laptop and desktop in the office.

The product’s ability to block phishing sites is valuable. It protects me from malware.

The product is a bit heavy on the machine. Sometimes, the product is very slow. When we connect an external hard disk, it takes the product quite some time to go through the files and allow us to access them.

I have been using the solution for more than six months.

I rate the tool’s stability a seven out of ten.

The tool is quite scalable. We have around eight users.

We have had a couple of issues for which we contacted the technical support team. It takes long for the team to respond. It takes some time before the initial point of contact, but after that, it is fine.

Neutral

The deployment is quite easy and fast. I rate the ease of deployment an eight out of ten. The solution is deployed on the cloud. The deployment took us an hour.

The product is neither cheap nor expensive. However, it is a bit more on the expensive side. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten.

People who want to use the solution must start with the minimal features possible and scale up slowly, depending on how it interacts with their system. Overall, I rate the tool a seven and a half out of ten.