Check Point NGFW Reviews

We use the solution as a frontend firewall in our headquarters and in our branches. We use packet inspection, the antispam feature, and the VPN. We have configured threat prevention and content awareness to improve security on incoming email and on web surfing from interlan networks wits SSL inspection. Mobile access through the VPN mobile client is also used from all outside workers and is fully integrated with our AD. We also use the solution to route traffic on internal networks and manage security through client and server networks.

We have improved our performance and bandwidth through the networks. Security is also improved. We have better control over the logs and better integration with our SIEM. 

We can also manage all our firewall from a central management console so each policy is under control and can be developed better. Inline policies help to understand on the correct use of the policies and a more readable list. We can also manage policies in two or more people at once without problems or risk of making the wrong policy.

VPN and mobile VPN are extremely valuable to us. The policies are simple to deploy to the new branches. 

All policies can be deployed and managed in a very simple way. 

AD single sign-on with VPN mobile is very helpful and simple to manage and deploy. 

Log management is also a good place to make troubleshooting and through console manage events. 

Management of the object is also a valuable feature. At every point in the console you can manage object properties and look to each policy where it is used and simply change or find where the object is involved.

Some features, like the VPN, antispam, data loss prevention, etc., are managed in an external console. In the future, I'd like all features in the same console, in one place, where we can see and configure all features. I'd like a web console so that all firewalls can be managed from a web browser and we don't need to be installed on dedicated consoles and applications. 

I use the web console to mange the Gaia software in the firewall and it would be nice to have also policy management inside the web browser. 

I've used the solution for four months.

It is very stable. We have reboot only to install updates.

We chose the solution for scalability and now we are running with all branches with a Check Point firewall. The solution is meeting our expectations.

We do not need customer support.

Positive

We did use a different solution. We switched to improve security.

It was complex to set up due to the fact that we changed our mind on how the firewall works. Central management is hard to improve.

We implemented it through a vendor. There was not a high level of expertise, however, I took a course with Check Point and that was very clear and now I'm very expert on the Check Point world.

We have seen an ROI in that we need less time on managed policies and we have better control.

The cost is high but the benefits are too.

We also looked at Palo Alto, WatchGuard, and Fortinet.

The solution is a good solution and at the top of the market.

Currently, I'm working as a Lead Security Architect in the healthcare industry. We have two data centers, multiple branch offices, multiple cloud subscriptions, and over 200 employees. Our operation is mission-critical and requires it to be up and running 24/7. We need to protect multiple applications that are developed in-house, sensitive data including PHI, Financial, intellectual property, et cetera.

Check Point NGFW and its security modules have been our security solution for the past six years to protect all of our assets, including our cloud subscriptions.

Check Point Next Generation Firewalls are key components in protecting our assets and information. Their security modules are very easy to use and understand. Also, it's one of the most user-friendly interfaces I’ve had the opportunity to use and I’ve had the chance to work with more than four firewall solutions.

Their reporting and logs modules are amazing. It provides a level of detail and visibility that we haven't had before. It’s useful to understand what is happening on our network and has been very successful in blocking attacks and providing options for executive summaries. 

Being able to manage all the security gateways for our multiple sites in a single management console and share policies has been very beneficial.

The Remote Access VPN has been crucial to us, especially during this pandemic. We had to be on lockdown for a couple of months and being able to deploy a remote workforce with Check Point VPN was a crucial part of our business continuity strategy.

The logs and reporting are very easy to use and manage. Also, the IPS and IDS are critical components to keeping our network secure. They are very easy to configure and there are multiple templates that can be used out of the box that provides maximum protection to our network.

The support offers the best services I have experienced. It's better than any other IT vendor.

Check Point Firewalls haven't failed me during the past six years that I have been using them. 

If I had to mention anything that I would like to see some improvement on, it’s on the internet load balancing options. Internet load balancing provides either active/passive or active/active load balancing, however, I would like to see more options that provide SD-WAN capabilities while also allowing for more than two links. I know this can be performed with other network devices, however, adding the option as part of the NGFW would be awesome.

I have been using Check Point for 6 years now.

I've never had a single issue on any of my security gateways.

I haven't had the opportunity to scale, however, I have seen many demos of maestro architecture, and it looks awesome.

As I mentioned before, Check Point support is one of the best services from any IT vendor I have experienced. They answer very quickly and also provide solutions most of the time within the first call.

I have used multiple solutions in the past. We migrated from Cisco ASA to Check Point six years ago and have never looked back. Our old ASA required additional hardware components for additional security services.

The product is very easy to set up.

The implementation was performed by a vendor team in combination with our in-house security team.

My peace of mind is the ROI.

Check Point is not the cheapest firewall solution, but you get what you pay for. It's super reliable and their service is great.

I had the opportunity to review Palo Alto and Fortinet.

I'd advise other users to give it a try.

We use several of the blades. We use it for regular access control, but we also use the application control. We use HTTPS inspection and threat prevention. We use the Mobile Access blades as well IPS.

We have a Smart-1 205 as our management server and for the gateway we've got 3200s.

Over time, we've enabled different blades on the firewall. We started off with the access control policy, and since then we enabled the HTTPS inspection and the IPS blade. That's helped reduce our risk landscape as a whole.

The simplicity of the access control is the most valuable feature for us. It gives us the ability to easily identify traffic that is either being allowed or denied to our network. The ease of use is important to us. The more difficult something is to use, the more likely it is that you'll experience some type of service failure. When we do have issues, with the Check Point SmartConsole being as simple as it is to navigate, it makes it easy for us to identify problems and fix them, to minimize our downtime.

I would like there to be a way to run packet captures more easily in the GUI environment. Right now, if we want to read packet captures, we have to do so from the command line.

We have been using Check Point's NGFWs for as long as I've been with the Department of Mental Health, so it's three years that I've personally been using them.

Based on other networking hardware that I've used, I would say the Check Point NGFWs are just as stable, if not more so. We rarely have any issues. In the past, I've experienced networking hardware often needing to be rebooted. That's not something that happens with these devices. They're on 24/7 and we have next to no downtime. I can't think of a time in my three years here that one of the devices has gone down and caused us any downtime.

We've already purchased a new management server from Check Point, and it will be replacing our 205 appliance. They make it easy. These devices inter-operate together, so if we need more resources, for example, on the management end, we're able to buy that server and replace our old one and scale up as needed.

As far as users are concerned, we have 70 locations throughout the State of South Carolina with a total of 400 to 500 devices that can be connected at any point in time.

I would think we have plans to increase our usage. We work in tele-psychiatry, for the State of South Carolina, and telemedicine right now is a hot topic. I see it very likely that our usage could double and triple in the coming years.

We've had an issue with licenses not populating to a new device, but that is the only thing we've ever called them for in relation to replacing or adding in a new device.

They're very helpful. They're easy to get in touch with. It's not like you're sitting there on hold for hours at a time, and they're quick to get back to you. It might be that they're taking packet captures and analyzing them and then getting back to you. It's a quick turnaround. I can't think of any time we've ever had to wait more than 24 hours to get an answer on an issue we've had.

I have set up replacements and it's very straightforward. It's very easy. It's much easier than some of the other network equipment that I've had to deal with. Check Point provides a wizard that walks you through the process and that streamlines the entire process. They also provide instructions on how to go about getting to the wizard and the process that we needed to take to complete that configuration. It was relatively painless.

The replacement was configured in one day and deployed the next, with no issues.

There are five of us in our company who have management access. I'm the network administrator, and I've got four IT technicians who work under me and assist in the firewall configuration and deployment.

I don't believe we've ever had to actually call Check Point to assist with anything. It's pretty straightforward. The wizard does most of the work and we have all the instructions we need. It's pretty much all done in-house.

I definitely feel it's been worth our investment. Check Point is there to help when we need them. Our downtime has been very minimal, and when we do have issues, they're there to help us. They're there to get us back up and running as quickly as possible. It's definitely been worth its weight.

One of the main reasons that we went with Check Point is that they provide a good solution for a firewall but at an affordable price. As a state agency, we can't afford Cisco Firepower. It's just out of our budget to be able to pay for something where licensing and hardware are so expensive. Check Point has really met our needs for a budget-friendly solution.

We pay a yearly support fee in addition to the standard licensing fees with Check Point.

I've worked with Cisco routers and firewalls. I've worked with Ruckus switches and routers, and Aruba access points.

A drawback with these products is their stability. Almost all other networking devices I've seen need to be rebooted over time. If they're left unattended for extended periods of time, we experience some sort of downtime. That is not an issue with our Check Point products.

Do your research and look into cloud solutions. Check Point offers many cloud services, and that's where everything's moving, towards the future. Research the different appliances and solutions that Check Point offers and find out what works best for your particular situation.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Check Point's firewalls is not to be afraid to call for help. There are times where I may be trying to figure something out myself, when in all reality, all I need to do is call Check Point customer support. They'll explain to me why something is configured a certain way, or if there's a better way that I could go about configuring something, and things of that nature. They have been very helpful and have saved me time, anytime I've called.

I can't think of any additional features their NGFW needs that we don't already have access to. I know there are features such as moving the dashboard toward the cloud, and I think that's beneficial, but it's something they already offer. We just don't take advantage of it right now.

I have been using this solution since the GAIA OS R77 was there. I am using it for my day to day access such as policy creation, policy modification, and also regularly policy disabling and deletion. I have 17K+ users in my organization, 100 + client to site VPN and I have a number of S2S as well. My daily job is health checkup, security log monitoring and incident management, daily IPS checks, threat presentation reports and to analyze the risk and take necessary action on that as well.

It secures my organization. With the application blade, I can make security as application based and the custom application is also very useful. With identity awareness blades we get insights on our local users who are accessing/passing through the respective rule as users.  We also use the DLP, IPS, and VPN features. We have multiple site to sites with our clients and it is very easy to configure and manage.

IPS helps with security against upcoming and unknown threats and activities. We regularly check the report and as per daily report we will check the risk and prevent each alert that is critical based on our business requirement and make it secure.

IPSec VPN is also our key feature as our organization having widely customer across globe so it is very good feature to us to connect and run our business with them very smoothly and softly. 

The unknown category has been a pain point. We cannot understand this category and the Check Point engineers are also stuck with it. If we enable HTTPS inspection then without this category my URL will stop working. This has a huge impact on my business. We are still running without HTTPS inspection even in a monitoring mode.

Our SAM rule is also not working to block the IP address which we don't allow in our organization so we have to create a traditional rule base block which is a time-consuming job for me and my team.

I am using this solution for four years.

This is widely scalable solution.

I would say not much exp and not lower, average technical support. We are struggling in most of the cases.

Very easy.

In-house team and technical support team.

I would say it's complete ROI for us.

Setup is easy, in my short tenure I have done multiple migrations and have set up our new organization. For cost and pricing, I don't have an idea.

This is a very good and best solution as a perimeter device for NGFW.

We use the solution for threat protection in the banking and finance sectors.

Check Point NGFW is popular because of the protection it offers. 

The pricing and UI need to be improved. 

The enterprise is quite expensive. There are small boxes that are competitive enough.

I have been using Check Point NGFW for a year.

The product is stable.

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

The solution can scale up to enterprises.

I rate the solution’s scalability a nine-point five out of ten.

The initial setup is easy, but maintenance is very difficult. Deployment and fine-tuning take a day.

There were no glitches or issues. We were able to achieve a positive ROI for our business. It saved them a significant amount of money that would otherwise have been spent on dealing with ransomware activities.

The product is expensive and costs around one-point-five million.

I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

Thorough planning is essential when implementing a Check Point NGFW. You need a checklist outlining what policies to establish. While the installation is straightforward and does not require much effort beyond obtaining a license, creating and configuring policies can be time-consuming. Therefore, allocating sufficient time and resources to policy creation is crucial to ensure effective security management.

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

Currently, we utilize Check Point firewalls, IPS, site-to-site VPN, and remote access VPN features for our various client operations.

We have implemented a cloud firewall for one of our customers and primarily handle perimeter security using Check Point firewalls for multiple customers.

We also handle POCs, implementation, upgrades, and daily security operations as part of our services.

We are distributor partners who also distribute Check Point products to our customers. We recently convinced our clients to use Check Point firewall services and signed a contract with them.

We have not received any issues from any clients using Check Point services so far. It is really great to use and up-to-date. In Check Point, we have never seen it hit any vulnerabilities like other products.

Also, the TAC support from Check Point is excellent. I really appreciate it when dealing with complex issues. It allows us to easily obtain vendor support without many issues compared to other products.

Certifications and training from Check Point are valuable. I recently attended a boot camp and found it both knowledgeable and enjoyable.

Recently, I came across the Check Point Infinity AI feature in one of the Check Point webinars, which I believe is unique and will be very useful in the future.

Also, Check Point Harmony and Quantum deliver uncompromising performance with advanced threat prevention, policy management, remote access VPN IoT security, SD-WAN, and more.

Infinity Threat Prevention is an innovative management model. It provides zero-maintenance protection from zero-day threats and continuously and autonomously ensures that your protection is up-to-date with the latest cyber threats and prevention technologies.

The upgrade process of Check Point could be simplified to match other products.

For some of the MSSP partners, Check Point should personally go and give demos to them. This way, the MSSP can show their clients what Check Point is capable of and what kind of new technologies and features Check Point is coming up with.

Adding automation for upgrades and hotfix installation would be a beneficial new feature for administrators from an operations standpoint. Additionally, Check Point should pay more attention to endpoint security; they are currently lacking in that area compared to other competitors.

I've been using Check Point products for more than eight years.

The solution is 100% stable. 

The solution offers 100% scalability.

Technical support is very good.

Positive

No; we have multiple clients, so we use multiple products.

The setup is fine; I've only faced issues during upgrades.

The expertise of the vendor is excellent. I'd rate them ten out of ten.

The ROI is really good.

In terms of cost, pricing, and licensing, Check Point is not very expensive or complex.

We did not evaluate other options. 

My overall experience is really good. I am enjoying working with Check Point products, especially on the firewall. It's much easier compared to other firewalls.

We use the solution as a perimeter firewall. We also use it for endpoint security and VPN.

The product is very user-friendly. The configuration can be managed and customized as required. We can customize the tool for each stakeholder.

It will be good if the product is rack-mounted. The product must be updated to protect users from the latest firewall threats.

I have been using the solution for almost six years.

The tool is very stable.

The tool is easily scalable. Almost 2000 people are using the product in my organization.

The support is good.

Positive

We also work with other vendors. Check Point is as good as its competitors, but its cost is a bit higher.

The initial setup is very easy. One firewall engineer can deploy the product within a few hours. It is very easy to maintain the tool. We need only one person to maintain it.

The tool is a bit expensive. The product’s operational cost is very high. We pay a yearly licensing fee. We also pay for support.

Check Point is the most user-friendly solution. It can be configured quickly. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We use Check Point firewalls to secure our internal network from the outside world and to provide a good, comfortable, and secure environment for our employees.

We have various models from the R80 series, such as the R80.10 and the R80.30.

Before, we were using firewalls from Palo Alto. The benefit of the Check Point firewall is that it has more security features. It has antivirus signatures and additional features for which we should require additional hardware devices in the firewall. It also gives us a central management system, which was not present in the Cisco ASA.

Check Point's Next Generation Firewall has many good features. It has a central management system, and that means we do not have to go to each and every firewall to configure it. We can manage them with the central device. 

There are also additional features, compared to a Layer 4 or Layer 3 firewall, such as AV signatures and devices, which are very helpful for securing the company's network.

The only thing which I think should be improved is that training should be increased. In my position I also interview potential employees and I haven't found many people in the market, nowadays, who are familiar with the Check Point firewall. They are more familiar with Palo Alto and Cisco ASA and they are more comfortable with them. Check Point is one of the good firewalls and training should be increased by the company so that more people are familiar with it and with their switches.

I have been using Check Point's firewalls for the last three-and-a-half years.

The stability is very good. The updates we get for the antivirus and the URL filtering sites are also very nice and happen very often. That is a good thing because there are various new attacks coming out but we get their updates on time. 

In terms of the scalability, it is very easy to extend the utilization of Check Point firewalls. We did so in the past. We extended our environment in our organization and it was very easy to extend it.

We have around 4,000 to 5,000 people who are using the Check Point firewalls directly or indirectly. They are passing their traffic through it. Expansion of our usage completely depends on the organization. If they want to do so they will tell us and, if that happens, we will definitely go for Check Point firewalls.

We have used Check Point TAC to resolve our issues. We have had good support. They have good engineers there.

We were using Palo Alto and Cisco before and we replaced them with Check Points.

We used Palo Alto in a  few of our sites, but we found Palo Alto was more expensive and its updates and services were also more expensive compared to the Check Point firewall.

Cisco is a very basic firewall in the market, and it has a limited set of features, compared to Palo Alto and Check Point. Palo Alto has rich features, but it is one of the more expensive firewalls in the market. The Check Point firewall is not too expensive, but it is also a third-generation firewall.

The drawback of the Check Point firewall is the lack of training materials. That should be increased.

We have a team of seven to eight people who have all installed and configured environments so the initial setup, for us, was a very straightforward process. And these are the people who handle maintenance of the firewall and manage it, during different shifts. They are all network engineers.

It took us between nine and 12 months to do the implementation. We have Check Point hardware so we followed the recommended, three-level architecture, in which there is a SmartConsole, the hardware security gateway firewall, and the central management device.

The pricing is good. It is less than Palo Alto's firewalls. Check Point has the same features as Palo Alto, but the licensing and cost of these firewalls are not too expensive. It is one of the best firewalls in the market in this range.

Check Point firewalls have many features. Before configuring it in an environment, you should know each and every feature of the firewall. You should also follow the three-level hierarchy which is recommended by Check Point.

There are a few add-on features for Check Point firewalls. I only learned that by using the firewalls. I'm very happy with the way Check Point is progressing. They continue to work on their firewalls even after making their name. That is something we should follow in our lives as well: Once we have made our name, we should not stop there. We should further build the reputation of the company and product.

We are very happy with the Check Point firewalls. The only thing missing, as I mentioned earlier, is that training should be increased for the firewall by the organization. Otherwise, we are very happy with investment in this solution.