Check Point NGFW Reviews

I'm a consultant and Check Point partner. I have deployed a lot of Check Point firewalls and support Check Point firewalls for our customers. Our customer environments are different. I deployed standalone, cluster, and two-layer firewalls. 

One of our customers has over 200 branch offices which were protected by Check Point SMB appliances. All these appliances are managed by CheckPoint SmartProvisioning. 

This customer has one cluster Check Point which secures server segments and one cluster Check Point which secures client segments.

Check Point firewall products include a lot of modules. Application Control, IPS, email security, mobile access, content awareness, URL filtering, antivirus, antibot, and DLP. Check Point meets our customer requirements at the perimeter with an all-in-one solution. 

For example, the IPS blade prevents attacks with updated signatures. URL filtering policy control customers users' internet activity. Antivirus and antibot blade controls malicious activity and files. Mobile access blades give customers to access their sites from anywhere securely.

There are a lot of features that I found valuable for our customers. 

For example, active-active and active-standby high availability features are very useful. 

If you want to share traffic loads to both cluster members you can use the active-active feature, if you don't want to share traffic loads you can prefer active standby. Your connections sync on both cluster members at both high availability choices. That way, your connections are never lost. 

Another valuable feature is performance improvement ability. With ClusterXL and CoreXL you can improve performance.

Check Point should add additional management choices. For example, Check Point doesn't fully have management support via browser. You need to use Check Point's SmartConsole for management. SmartConsole is .exe and it is supported only on the MS Windows platform. If you are using Linux or a Mac you can not manage Check Point. You should be able to use a virtual PC whose OS is Windows inside the Linux or MAC. Check Point states that this is a decision made for security reasons, however, certain management features can be done through the browser, yet not fully.

I have been using the Check Point firewall for about 20 years.

Check Point support center is very professional.

Positive

We did not use a different solution previously.

After buying the firewall, you can use Check Point for a lifetime, however, it is a subscription base for content security features.

We also evaluated Fortinet and Cisco.

If you are looking for a firewall appliance that has a lot of security features, easy installation, and configuration, Check Point firewall products are the best for you.

The environment in which it was deployed is a financial institution that requires high availability, confidentiality, and integrity of information within the supporting infrastructure. The NGFW is used specifically for the VPN, firewalling and it also serves as virtual patching in the event of zero-day vulnerabilities that are very common within some well know client desktop computers and servers.

Initially, I was using the Cisco ASA5500 series firewall. I never believed there could be better firewall devices in terms of ease of setup and management. The NGFW from Check Point has increased my confidence in terms of performance and ease of configuration with its intuitive interface. It supports the VPN configuration without any unnecessary latency and packet dropping.                                                                                                                              

It blocks over 97% of threats!                                          

VPN, firewalling, and virtual patching are the most valuable aspects for me. The NGFW is so effective that I can go to sleep and vacation. Check Point products rarely have vulnerabilities that put the whole organization at risk, unlike some other firewall products.

The VPN tunnels are very effective in terms of stability and quick connection.

Virtual patching is useful as a workaround for zero-day vulnerabilities.                           

It offers excellent filtering of URLs.

The interface can be more user-friendly in terms of the design and location of critical and commonly used icons.

They could add a web user Interface.

I have been using the Check Point NGFW since 2018 when it was deployed in my company.

The stability is awesome and it puts me in a no-worries mood!

The scalability is awesome.

Technical support is friendly and awesome.

Positive

I did use Cisco ASA. The administration was grueling coupled with some nefarious vulnerabilities and the cost of ownership.

The initial deployment was demanding due to my network architecture, not because of the product.

The implementation was done through a vendor.

We've seen ROI at 6 months to 1 year.

However, the ROI was realized within weeks of deployment.

The solution is reasonably priced relative to some other brands.

We did not evaluate other options.

It is the best amongst the rest.

We implement Check Point in the front end to protect internet platforms and security platforms. 

Check Point provides very good performance with many solution options and many kinds of modules.

I'd like to see more integration with other solutions. 

I've been using this solution for a couple of months. 

This solution is stable and scalable.

We've rarely used support but they've been helpful when we needed them. 

We migrated from Cisco to Check Point. Check Point is easier for the administration console.

Before migrating to Check Point, we tested it in several environments. We used a consultant for deployment and we now have 800 users in the company and six engineers responsible for maintenance. 

We pay an annual license fee. 

I recommend this solution and rate it a 10 out of 10. 

We deployed a Check Point firewall on the perimeter as well as on the internal network. Both are in HA & we have enabled all threat prevention blades. All devices are 5600 & 4200. We are managing our two firewalls with two different security management servers.

Currently, we are using the R80.20 firmware version and we have a pretty simple design.

Our primary uses are firewall security, VPN, web filtering & monitoring. We have also used the TE-100X appliance for private cloud sandboxing.

With Check Point, we achieved redundancy but the problem was three public IP addresses that were required to be configured as HA, with two physical IPs & one virtual IP.

Our previous firewall used a single public IP but now, with Check Point using three, it became very difficult for us to make available the same segment of public IP addresses from our ISP. After many support calls, however, we found a solution.

The other option which is helpful is that there are no limits for any objects used in the policy. Our previous firewall does support limited time objects & IP address objects.

Check Point's new Smart dashboard has an all-in-one configuration interface. They provide a very easy configuration for NAT and one tick for source & destination NAT is possible.

Policies can be configured in a more organized way using a section & layered approach.

Application control has all of the required application data to introduce it into policy and the URL filtering works great, although creating regular expressions is complicated.

The software upgrade procedure is very easy; it just needs few clicks & we are done.

Check Point has both GUI (Graphical Interface) & smart dashboard, but it will be better if it sticks to either one of them. 

A threat prevention policy needs to be created in a different tab but instead, if those policies could be related to access policy then it will be easier to apply the threat prevention to our relevant traffic.

One of the most complicated aspects is the VPN Configuration, which should be simplified in future releases. The monitor tab should have a VPN tab, where we can see the current tunnel status.

I have been using Check Point NGFW for more than the last three years.

With respect to stability, we always have ongoing support calls. We have faced lots of issues that have led to upgrading with a Hotfix.

When it comes to scalability, our current Check Point is far better than our previous firewall.

Technical support is very helpful & always there to help us with issues. Also, the TAC response is quick.

Previously, we had a Fortinet firewall, which was pretty slow when it came to operations.

The initial setup was simple.

We implemented the firewalls with our in-house team.

Check Point should provide some basic license for mobile access VPN by default, for at least five to ten users.

The only other vendor that we have evaluated is Fortinet.

The primary use of the firewall is to allow or block some traffic. Mainly, it is the perimeter firewall for the Internet. It filters the traffic from external to internal, e.g., to secure the traffic. 

Some of our customers have been demanding Check Point as their firewall product.

I do the installation, support, firewalls, etc.

It provides a central station where it is very easy to deploy our firewall policy in one click to many firewalls. This is one of the leading perks. It saves time by having one central station because I can deploy the same kind of policy to many firewalls at once. 

With the latest release, it's easy to configure firewall rules with the scripting. This is one of the features that we have been demanding for some time so we can script some actions for automation.

The best part is that it is very intuitive. It is easy to configure, deploy, and maintain. If it works, it works.

The troubleshooting: When you find something that is not working, it is very easy to check in the logs what is failing and fix it in a short time.

The login tool is really nice.

We can virtualize the physical firewall in a virtual environment. However, the virtual environment is not stable at all. We have some customers who are using the virtual environment feature, and sometimes it crashes. We have many tickets open and the response is not as good as expected. We have to wait months for a resolution.

If you use all the features available on the firewall, it's not working. If you keep it simple, then it works. When you try to do cool things, you start to have some problems because that kind of integration is not fully developed.

I have worked with Check Point since 2007.

When it is failing, it is a nightmare. The stability has room for improvement. Sometimes, it is not working at all.

The scalability is good. I haven't had any scalability issues. If the firewall gets stressed, we buy a new firewall.

There are many options, such as, virtualization. They have also release a new product, Quantum, that makes it possible to scale up and have more firewalls. 

As an integrator, we have very big companies (like banks) to small companies, who have only 200 users or less. 

I would rate the technical support as a six out of 10. I have customers with no tickets open with Check Point and other customers who have many tickets open.

Solving some issues with them is a nightmare. They don't reply in time. They always ask the same questions. I expect better feedback from them, but that usually never happens.

Before Check Point, I used Cisco and Fortinet FortiGate.

The big differences is really the full integration firewall, e.g., Cisco doesn't provide this. Also, the Check Point central console is so much better because it provides that one central station, which is a plus.

The con for Check Point is the stability. The hardware for Check Point fails more often than other vendors. Usually, other firewalls are more stable than Check Point so I don't have to open as many cases with other vendors, like I do with Check Point.

There are two parts:

1. In the physical, you deploy with a wizard, which makes it very easy. It is a standard wizard where you click "Next, Next," then you see the GUI and everything is done there.
2. It is possible to do it in automatic way with the scripting. In the cases that you have some experience on it, it's very easy to deploy some scripts and the firewalls. For example, in the cloud, I created my own firewall with the same setup every day using the auto-integration since it's possible to integrate Azure with Check Point, which is very easy. One of the best features of the Check Point is its integration with the cloud, because not all vendors have that kind of integration.

The deployment time depends. If I do any scripting, it takes 30 minutes. If I do it manually, the deployment takes two hours. It also depends on the size and scope of the deploy, e.g., if I create a basic firewall rule or do a full automatic migration. However, It does take less time than other firewalls.

The implementation strategy depends on the customer.

I can deploy one firewall in an easy way. I can do it quickly by equiping firewall rules in text mode or in the API. However, when I have a problem, it's totally the opposite. I lose a lot of time.

The pricing and licensing are the worst part of Check Point. I usually don't know what I really am buying. When I have to do an inventory of the license, I don't know what it is being used for. Sometimes I feel I am being cheated, and the others times, I feel it is a bargain. Nobody knows! Even the Check Point representatives, they aren't clear on somethings, such as, what is the right license for what I need.

There is a possibility to have diamond support. You can have a technical engineer who is there just for you. When you have that type of feature, it's more expensive.

Cisco NGFWv

• Check the price first. 
• For migrations between different vendors, it's a nightmare. You need to do some tasks manually, otherwise it doesn't work when you migrate it. 
• Check the performance if it is working as expected. 
• Try to keep it simple.

It is a good product. I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10.

We provide solutions for various customers where we apply Check Point Firewalls, either for a VPN gateway or for securing their networks. We have provided them to a couple of financial customers to protect their mobile banking as well.

It has good features for searching the firewall rules and it has drastically changed daily operations. It's very easy, even for novice users or newcomers, to operate and manage this device. It has improved our operations that way.

The most valuable feature of the firewall is the packet inspection. That is an amazing feature from Check Point. Apart from that, we do have identity solutions which we use on a regular basis. Both are very good.

It would be great if the access management, the user management features, were improved in terms of the number of users that can be connected, and how users can access the various resources with the help of firewall authentication.

Also, one of the challenges I hear about from customers or engineers who work with and operate Check Point firewalls is not about the technical capabilities of the product but about understanding the product. There should be whitepapers available on the Check Point portal so that people can understand them more easily.

I have been using Check Point's firewalls for almost 12 years. I started with the IP390.

Stability has improved a lot from Check Point's very early days over the last 12 years. Back then we had to reboot the firewall after every two to four days.

The firewalls are scalable with our workload. We are at about 20 to 30 percent utilization so even if we doubled of our existing network resources and load on the firewalls, they would still have the space to scale. They're enough for the networks that we have implemented.

We recently finished a deployment and it's still in the user acceptance test phase. As of now, I cannot say anything in terms of increased usage. But for the customers that we have deployed it for within India and the APAC region, so far the results have been pretty good.

I have used technical support a couple of times, when it was required, for hardware replacements. Of course, once or twice I contacted them for active devices when we had some glitches. But that turned out to have nothing to do with Check Point.

Overall, technical support has been good. They understand the situation and what part needs to be replaced or what needs troubleshooting through remote support tools.

Before Check Point we used Cisco. And we use Cisco for a couple of customers because it's already pre-deployed, so it's not in our hands. We manage operations, so we are still managing Cisco devices. We don't have Juniper right now, but we have Palo Alto for one of our customers.

The initial setup is very straightforward. When we boot the firewall we have instructions which say how to connect to the QR, and from that portal you go to your gateway and configure all the required network interfaces. Once you have installed your Smart controller, you need not log into the firewall every time. Instead, you can log in through your Smart controller. That's a pretty good method which no other firewall provides.

For the very basic features, it does not take more than two days. But, for a full-fledged implementation, it can take around two months.

Our implementation strategy is to replace existing firewalls in the network. We try to keep the business downtime as short as possible, especially for business-critical applications.

For deployment and maintenance of these firewalls we have a team, worldwide in different regions: APAC, Europe, America, and the Middle East, although in the Middle East we don't use Check Point.

We have definitely achieved ROI with Check Point firewalls.

We definitely evaluate other options based on the customer's budget, and the stability and technical specs of the firewall. We generally choose Check Point as our preferred product vendor.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Check Point's firewalls is that they are not complex.

I'm expecting a lot of solutions from Check Point and if there are more solutions from them, that would be great. I would like to see more product development.

Overall, I would rate it at 10 out of 10. It's the best firewall in the market.

We use Checkpoint Firewalls to protect Datacenter VLANs against each other. In addition, we use them to protect our perimeter systems from the internet, and our internal network from the perimeter.

We have virtualized the systems on a VSX-Cluster using VSLS, but the basics are still the same compared to a traditional cluster. VSX gives us a bit more flexibility in the case of load-sharing. Therefore, it’s quite easy to react in the case of heavily used hardware distributing the load by failover or prioritizing VSs onto different nodes.

The biggest improvement is the central logging and management of all firewalls. Other IT-departments can get log-access and search for their own if there are missing rules or other issues.

Since we use Identity Awareness the solution becomes more flexible, as users no longer need static IPs. Especially for IT-users, who always need more rights, it was a big improvement.

Implementing Wi-Fi makes it nearly impossible to work without Identity Awareness. Unfortunately, we fought with some bugs in the IA-module, but we got them solved.

R80 management has improved and made the product more comfortable for IT people to use.

Filtering through rules and finding similar ones to add additional objects becomes much faster.

With an additional hotfix starting from R80.10, we are able to use the management with Ansible. From R80 on, we started creating objects via script or adding them to groups. That makes some parts “automatic”, or at least much faster.

With the new SmartTask offered in R80.40, we will be happy to configure some automatic control-functions.

The Check Point support needs a lot of improvement. We spend a lot of time troubleshooting issues ourselves, create good ticket descriptions, and try to explain in detail what has already been tested. Even so, it takes at least three ticket-updates before support really understands the issue. If you manage to reach the third-level support, you are still forced to be really critical of what kind of suggestions Check Point support is offering you. Running debugs on a test environment is quite different than running them in a heavily used production environment.

We have been using Check Point firewalls for 16 years.

We wanted to deploy a specialized Next-Generation Firewall in our perimeter security.

The solution addresses the Security requirements at Perimeter Layer including:

1. Network IPS
2. Application Control
3. IPSEC VPN
4. SSL VPN.
5. Proxy

It was required to enable IPSEC VPN between our vendors across the world

We got positive responses on Check Point Firewalls from our vendors as well.

Our team addresses the regular audits with a Next-Generation Firewall, starting from configuration and application vulnerabilities to customized reporting.

We have planned to achieve many business use cases including IPS, Network AV, Content Awareness - Data Leakage Prevention, IPSEC VPNs between our peers, SSL VPN with Posture Assessment, and Web Proxy as well.

This solution addressed most of our needs but required multiple license subscriptions.

Below are the few Business use cases we achieved through Check Point NGFW:

1. SSL VPN with Security Posture Assessment
2. SSL VPN with In-build Multi-Factor Authentication Option (Certificate + User Credentials)
3. Content Filtering (Identity Awareness and DLP)
4. Forward Proxy with Web and Application Control
5. Enabling Anti-Bots and IPS

The SSL VPN with posture assessment helped us to remove the dedicated Standalone SSL VPN solution which was benefited both commercially and technically.

Anti-Bots and IPS enabled security on the network traffic.

Along with VPN and Proxy (Web and application control), we removed another standalone proxy for internal use and extended the content filtering to roaming users as well.

The security posture assessment with two-factor authentication has saved more time and commercial costs by avoiding deploying having to deploy another solution.

It took so many weeks to migrate our old firewall to Check Point after we did internal and external assessments on earlier setups and enabled multiple security features.

We had difficulty configuring the NAT. For example, instead of following A-B-C, we need to do A-C-B

Initially, we faced a few challenges with firmware. Later this was addressed with jumbo hotfixes.

We tried to create a single management software to manage the policies, view the logs, have a mobile access VPN, and do reporting.

Please concentrate on local services enablement for faster resolutions.

We have been using this solution since July 2020.

Initially, we faced a few challenges with the firmware. We later addressed this with help of jumbo and custom hotfixes. Later, it performed well.

The solution is scalable in terms of enabling the features and deploying management servers.

We would recommend they have regular feedback sessions with customers.

Neutral

We used another firewall that enables basic security features with lot of limitations.

We found the setup difficult in the earlier stages as our team used to work with another CLI-based solution.

Our In-house team handled the implementation. 

I'd advise users to validate the licensing model during the pre-evaluation period itself. It took a few days for us to understand DLP and Mobile Access Blades that had to be procured separately along with the NGTP bundle to address our requirements.

We evaluated Palo Alto and FortiGate.