Check Point Remote Access VPN Reviews

The tool is easy to configure and use. We integrated it with Active Directory to manage user authentication. It's intuitive and transparent, making it simple for users to use. It connects automatically to the VPN whenever users turn on the laptop. The product is efficient and offers centralized control. 

The main area for improvement is pricing. Another area could be integrating MFA authentication directly into the solution instead of using separate benchmark tools for implementation.

Nearly all of the company's 700 users used the solution during the COVID-19 emergency.

I rate the tool's ease of deployment an eight out of ten. Integrating the solution with the firewall is easy. Implementing a new user typically takes only five to ten minutes. You create the user in the firewall, install the client, and configure the username, making it ready to use.

Maintaining the solution is my responsibility. However, managing the firewall and VPN involves only two or three people. If you consider the entire security area, there are more people involved.

The product is expensive. I rate its pricing a ten out of ten. For the cost of one product, we could purchase two or three Fortinet solutions with the same amount of money.

Our previous company used this product because it's an excellent solution in the cybersecurity community. It was particularly important in Peru, where we had a strong presence in major companies. We selected the solution and used it for approximately ten years. Even after I left the company, they continued using it because of its importance in Peru and its presence in significant companies.

Fortinet may have gained more presence in recent years than Check Point Remote Access VPN, likely due to its lower cost. However, during my time at the company, we continued to use it. The company may consider migrating to other solutions primarily for cost reasons, as Fortinet is cheaper. However, this decision might not be based on technical superiority but on price considerations.

I rate the product a ten out of ten. You can use it if you can afford the pricing. 

We primarily use the solution as a VPN for connection purposes. It helps us connect to corporate. 

It is easy to use and easy to set up. The setup is very fast.

The security is pretty good. 

It is stable most of the time.

It's becoming old-fashioned and slightly out of date. We're moving towards DNS.

We have noted some stability issues. 

I've used the solution for more than a year at this point. The company has maybe used it longer. 

The stability is very good. I'd rate it nine out of ten. It could be a bit better. It might now work with all programs. 

The solution is scalable. We have 80 or 90 users on the product.

It is not extensively used. 

We do not need to use technical support. We are technical ourselves and can handle issues. 

I've used Palo Alto and Sophos, among other solutions. I've used a few different solutions. 

The initial setup is very fast and straightforward. It only takes about five to ten minutes. 

You simply set up your firewall and handle settings and then send links to your IT team that can connect them.

We were able to manage the setup in-house. We did not use a consultant or integrator. 

I have not witnessed any ROI. 

The license is renewed yearly. I'm not sure of the exact price or if it is expensive. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

I would advise companies to make sure the configuration is correct on the firewall.

We wanted to give employees the possibility to work from anywhere outside of the organization, being a house or another remote location of offices. We wanted this capability with the possibility and ease to grant them access to our perimeter network so that they could access the data or internal applications for the use of each of its functions. We wanted faster, safer, and more efficient transactions that are going to be shared within our organization based on the business.

This tool gave us the possibility and the benefit of being able to establish that all users, according to their geographical location, need to transfer, manage, execute, validate, and maintain data. We are always in contact with all users within and outside. It is strong, fast, easy to install, and extremely secure for each of the functions that it is designed for. Important to note is that one of the features uses a single sign-on approach.

Among other features, advantages, and services that the solution provides us, it is important to understand that it gives us the possibility, capacity, and management for establishing that each of the resources is accessed through encrypted communication tunnels. A single login based on a second authentication factor is giving us the possibility of integrating third-party services for authentication based on a security scheme. This goes beyond a simple password, giving us the possibility of integrating more than one service. 

A characteristic to improve is the communication service under the SMTP scheme. In some cases, it is quite complex when it comes to managing, configuring, forwarding, and integrating mail services. It consumes a lot of processing and RAM memory. We want a solution that allows us to use current resources so that high processing peaks demanded by the virtual or physical equipment do not occur. 

I've used the solution for four years.

Check Point Remote Access VPN is a VPN solution that allows users to securely connect to corporate networks from remote locations. It enables users to access corporate resources such as files, applications, and network devices as if they were on the corporate network.

The primary use case of Check Point Remote Access VPN is to provide secure remote access for employees, contractors, and partners who need to access corporate resources while working remotely. This can include employees working from home, traveling, or working in a remote office location. 

It can improve an organization by providing secure access to resources for traveling employees, which can help to reduce the risk of data breaches or other security incidents. 

It also can improve the organization's security posture by providing secure remote access with multi-factor authentication, encryption, and other security features.

It is important to note that the results of the solution will depend on the organization's specific environment and configuration as well as how well it is implemented and managed.

Some of the features that are considered most valuable in Check Point Remote Access VPN include: 

Multi-factor authentication. This feature allows organizations to use a combination of authentication methods such as certificates, tokens, biometric authentication, and user credentials to secure remote access connections.

Encryption. This feature provides end-to-end encryption for remote access connections, which helps to protect against eavesdropping and other forms of man-in-the-middle attacks. 

The solution needs:

Advanced monitoring and reporting capabilities in order to have a more detailed visibility into security incidents and events. It's important to note that the areas of improvement and additional features will vary depending on the specific use case and the organization's security needs, so it is recommended to contact the vendor to know more details about their roadmap and the next releases of the product. 

Improved scalability to allow the solution to handle larger numbers of users and devices without a significant impact on performance. 

I've used the solution for one year.

We needed to grow a little more at a cloud level, which means that we have had more places in which we host information, and needed to protect it. We needed to allow users to have access from the different branches in the cloud to our main branch and to access remotely. As a result of these needs, we have been looking for solutions that allow us to have quick and efficient access no matter which branch we are going to access, and to have access allowed quickly and easily as if users were inside the perimeter area of ​​our organization.

Currently, Check Point is an ally that we have used within our organization to protect the perimeter area, the equipment, and other technologies. We have complete protection in one technology that we are using so that our users with greater frequency can access the data of our organization regardless of where they are. With this, they can have quick, simple access as if they were within the perimeter area. This has given us greater protection when it comes to having protected and verified access under user identity.

We can integrate remote access to our branches through Check Point services; however, those services come with a centralized identity, a domain identity, which does not work for the different logins. It only works for the login through the remote connection application. The user profile is centralized, verified, and filtered by the tool, thus being one of the characteristics that are very important to me since it shows any activity that the user is going to carry out.

We'd like to integrate Check Point into the Remote Access VPN solution and have the ability to integrate multiple devices as access points through the solution. This would allow us to have a tool that it is not only remote access for mobile devices but a remote access solution for virtual teams, including mobile devices such as cell phones, tablets, and other types of devices in IoT areas such as doors, houses, and medical equipment.

I've been using the solution for one year.

In our environment, we have many users working remotely. It's important to control the flow of traffic coming and going to these remote employees, and isolate traffic when used for business purposes. We have to allow our remote users to access services from home as though they were in the office. However, at the same time, we need to control that traffic and make sure it conforms to our policy. Our environment is complex and requires advanced policies to look at traffic in very unique ways from different users. Check Point's policy management has allowed us to do that.

At the beginning of the pandemic, everyone rushed to get their employees working from home. Luckily for us, we already had a strong structure around how remote access would work and had it set up for many employees. 

With the groundwork in place, the transition to remote work was made easy by simply adjusting the policy (configuration). In part, this is because we were already prepared for a remote workforce, and that preparation came from within our organization, however, if it weren't for Check Point enabling us to adjust rapidly, then it would not have been an easy transition.

The unified platform view is great. Being able to manage NGFW alongside our Remote Access Policies allows us to control traffic in one way. Be it if our users are at home or in the office the same policy applies to them allowing us to have one corporate view on the traffic within our organization.

Being able to integrate the policy with things like Active Directory groups, Azure cloud objects, RADIUS integration, and load balancing capabilities is wonderful. All of these things are built into their NGFW policy which we leverage to implement on our Remote Access policy.

The ability to allow split-tunneling while still following our corporate policy needs to be on the table. Right now, in order to allow the same policy to apply, the users' traffic must be routed up to our NGFW before going out to the internet. Having a method to apply the same policy to the client for outbound traffic while connected to the VPN would be huge.

Some things like the compliance aspect of the VPN Client can be updated to bring it a little more modern. It's very useful for checking things like Windows Updates levels before connecting, however, it could use a facelift since it's still quite old-looking.

I've been managing Check Point's Remote Access VPN for five years at my current employment, and had used it before at a previous employer.

The solution has been solid for me for over five years.

I get the impression this could scale up to whatever you need. Scaling issues might only be moving to clustered resources and setting up load balancing on gateways. Once you get big enough you should be able to scale up to your needs.

Support has been great 98% of the time. There's always one bad experience, yet, overall I wouldn't rate them based on that. If they need to get their experts online to help solve a problem, they have plenty and are willing to work through really deep subjects. I never worry with their support.

Positive

At our organization, we did not use another solution before this. That said, I have used other products in the past. It's been many years, so I'm sure those other vendors have had time to update their products too, however, since I've been managing Remote Access with Check Point, I've always been really impressed.

Setting up the VPN Clients is simple once you've already got the gateway in place. If you have to setup the Gateway, it will take a bit of knowledge and expertise.

Our in-house team set it up. That said, I have been working with network devices for a long time.

ROI on the VPN User license itself returns within a couple of months of you using it. However, if you have to make the investment into buying gateways for the product, then the ROI could be one year (if your whole organization is working from home), or up to three years if you barely use it.

You need to be an NGFW customer already. Otherwise, you'll need to purchase the gateways in order to terminate the VPN. That much should be obvious to anyone. Once you have the gateway in place, there is a VPN User license you need to purchase, however, it is very minimal in cost compared to other infrastructure.

We inherited the Check Point when we took over. Then, when the topic of remote access came up, it made sense to use what we had and just buy additional licensing rather than buy a whole new product.

Check Point products are typically not cheap, however, I've found it's often due to the fact that you can do a lot with it. 

I recommend Check Point products to anyone who is going to have the time and expertise to administer them. You're going to be able to do what you want to do, engineer a design that works for you. If you want to just plug it in and forget about it, then this might not be the product for you. That said, for those who do just want to plug something in and forget about it, I warn you to be cautious. When it comes to Remote Access, you don't want to ignore this. You want to be looking at it and you want to monitor it, otherwise attackers will take advantage of that weakness. This is where Check Point allows you to monitor the edge, while granularly controlling it.

I use Remote Access VPN for clientless applications, setting up WireGuard tunnels, and WireGuard VPN as a service. It provides remote access for SIP setups, allowing users to connect securely through a VPN.

The most valuable features include application access, clientless application access, and WireGuard. These features make it easy to deploy and offer a user-friendly interface. The complexity is hidden within a full mesh network, allowing seamless user-to-application connectivity with minimal delay.

Automations for cloud integrations need to be expanded, and currently, developers have to manually configure APIs, which is not developer-centric. Improving this process could enhance the solution's scalability and efficiency.

I have used Check Point Remote Access VPN for two and a half years.

Some connectivity issues arise occasionally, especially when accessing the internet or using other applications. The installed client sometimes reconnects, possibly due to conflicts with existing VPN solutions.

The solution is extremely scalable, with an eight out of ten rating due to its mesh network and ability to build WireGuard tunnels. However, additional automation is required to enhance its enterprise features.

Customer service is excellent. Support is integrated into the product, making it easy to access without needing to search for contact information. There is an icon in the portal for online support, and Check Point local support promptly replies to queries.

Positive

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the initial setup of Check Point Remote Access VPN as ten because it is super easy to set up.

The pricing is rated eight to 8.5 out of ten. The costs increase with the purchase of advanced features. Licensing issues need to be sorted as different features require separate licenses.

The best solution for small to medium businesses. Licensing issues need to be sorted out. For example, features like CASB and browser security should be bundled. Having automations will help scale to other scenarios.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

Remote Access VPN (Remote Access VPN) allows users in our organization to connect to a private network to access services and resources remotely. This connection is secure and is made through the Internet. It came to support us so that users, whenever they were outside the organization and were supporting customers from any region, could have secure access to the corporation's data. 

Another important point is when our executives travel to regions where certain access to services is blocked. The VPN helps us bypass that block. Since a VPN can hide your real IP address, it can help you bypass geo-blocks, as the platform the one you want to access will think it is from the “correct” geographic region.

The solution is giving us security when it comes to sharing our data safely through the private and secure tunnel that is created when creating the VPN. The VPN hides your IP address and encrypts your online traffic and it essentially ensures that your fingerprints cannot be traced on the Internet. Online hackers won't be able to use your real IP address to discover your personal data, and government surveillance agencies and ISPs won't be able to monitor what you do online by snooping on your traffic.

In addition to helping you avoid government surveillance, it also helps keep your privacy safe from advertisers.

In terms of the way they ensure traffic, an example is when we use Wi-Fi in public areas.

WiFi is everywhere nowadays and it is extremely convenient to use, especially if you have a tight mobile data plan. The only problem with free WiFi is that it's often unsecured, which means you're putting your personal data at risk every time you use it. After all, cybercriminals can find out a lot about you, which can lead to them stealing your:

• Credit card details
• Bank account details
• Email login credentials

However, if you use a VPN, you won't have to worry about those dangers. A VPN uses encryption to protect your online communications, making sure no one can monitor it. Basically, if a hacker tried to see your connection traffic, they would just see nonsense.

That the level of Remote access VPN was higher by default as other brands do it that way. In the case of Check Point, they are not like that. The maximum it is giving us is only 5 licenses and if you need more, they must be purchased separately. From my perspective, it should be added to the same cost as the general license, and that well explained makes the product more attractive. Many organizations would have this need, as many are moving off-premise. We have great executives and entire corporate teams that perform work tasks from home.

I've used the solution for about 2 years.