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Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

Check Point Software Technologies and Cisco are both solutions in the Cloud and Data Center Security category. Check Point Software Technologies is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.6, while Cisco is ranked #7 with an average rating of 9.5. Check Point Software Technologies holds a 1.4% mindshare in CDCS, compared to Cisco’s 14.0% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Check Point Software Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco users who would recommend it.
Check Point CloudGuard Netw...
Read 152 Check Point CloudGuard Network Security reviews
  • 902 Views
  • 345 Comparison Views
96% willing to recommend
Cisco Secure Workload
Read 15 Cisco Secure Workload reviews
  • 3,434 Views
  • 2,325 Comparison Views
100% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security and Cisco Secure Workload compete in the network security management category. Check Point may have a pricing and support advantage, whereas Cisco provides comprehensive features.

Features: Check Point CloudGuard Network Security emphasizes threat prevention, scalability, and integrations, especially in hybrid cloud environments. Cisco Secure Workload offers advanced micro-segmentation, workload protection, and strong security mechanisms suitable for complex, multi-cloud scenarios.

Room for Improvement: Check Point could enhance its user interface and reporting functionalities and expand its integration capabilities with other security tools. Cisco might improve ease of use, documentation accessibility, and offer a more competitive pricing model.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Check Point is praised for its seamless deployment and excellent customer service, which aids quick implementation and problem-solving. Cisco facilitates deployment with detailed documentation, though it does not match Check Point's customer service reputation.

Pricing and ROI: Check Point offers lower initial costs and favorable ROI due to cost management and performance gains over time. Cisco, with its extensive security features, requires a higher investment, potentially offset by its advanced protection benefits for organizations focusing on security.

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To learn more, read our detailed Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload Report (Updated: April 2025).
Buyer's Guide
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload
April 2025
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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Check Point CloudGuard Netw...
Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
152
Ranking in other categories
Firewalls (8th), Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (1st), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (3rd), WAN Edge (3rd), Unified Threat Management (UTM) (6th)
Cisco Secure Workload
Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (14th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is 1.4%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 14.0%, up from 12.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud and Data Center Security
 

Featured Reviews

Martin Raška - PeerSpot reviewer
Unification of security features strengthens network protection
The overall network security is good. It's big-picture, all in one bundle. It's valuable to have everything in one place instead of spreading across different products. Unified security management positively affects a company's security operations. They have one unified view of the security. I can connect multiple gateways to the management and have it in one place. I can have reporting and views in a single pane of glass on the consolidated platform. It's easy to use. The management is the best on the market. It's very easy to work with, read, understand, and navigate. It helps increase our customer's security posture. We can see in some cases CloudGuard improves our customers' posture overall.
Read full review
Raj Metkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption
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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I think it is secure and user-friendly."
"This solution brings us closer to having a better security score, which helps us a lot in complying with information regulations based on security."
"The solution is stable. Most Check Point solutions are stable."
"The number of options it gives for deployment or security is valuable. When it comes to security, it has a feature that is super awesome for zero-day-based attacks. Their IPS is also very capable. We tested other firewalls, and we understood that it is the best one in the market."
"The SSL spectrum proved to be the most valuable for our incoming connections."
"The ease of administration with the cloud management extension and the cloud licensing model is valuable."
"It provides a huge benefit in many ways, offering a boost in confidence for secure cloud deployment and migration."
"The visibility, the one-pane-of-glass which allows me to see all of my edge protection through one window and one log, is great. Monitoring everything through that one pane of glass is extremely valuable."
More Check Point CloudGuard Network Security pros
"Instead of proving that all the access control lists are in place and all the EPGs are correct, we can just point the auditor to a dashboard and point out that there aren't any escaped conversations. It saves an enormous, enormous amount of time."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is security."
"The product provides multiple-device integration."
"The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network."
"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don't have to do packet captures on the network."
"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."
"It's stable."
More Cisco Secure Workload pros
 

Cons

"The biggest room for improvement is that, for a long time now, they've moved everything over to R80 but they still maintain some of the stuff in the old dashboard. They need to "buy in" and move everything to the modern dashboard so that you don't have to go to one place and to another place, at times, to configure the environment. It's time they just finish what they started and put everything in the new, modern dashboard."
"There is room for improvement in the integration with PaaS services from the public cloud. It would be very helpful."
"The user interface can be improved."
"It should be more agile, as it seems to me that they took their on-prem devices and uploaded them to the cloud. Every time we need a new interface or something like that, we need to make major changes. This is a problem."
"The reporting needs enhancement. Currently, we are not always aware of the gateways' status, like CPU and RAM usage."
"Check Point CloudGuard is not a feature-centric product because Check Point concentrates on security."
"I think they have pretty much mastered what can be done. There are some nuances like when you fail over from one cluster member to the other, the external IP address takes about two minutes to fail over."
"More support from our partners would be beneficial. A lot could be explained more."
More Check Point CloudGuard Network Security cons
"The product must be integrated with the cloud."
"It is highly scalable, but there is a limitation that it is only available on Cisco devices."
"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."
"There's room for improvement when it comes to Cisco Secure Workload. A couple of internal areas could be refined a little bit. They are trying to solve it, depending on where you suppose the agent is. Suppose you have the agent on both the server and the client, which could be the front-end server or web server connecting to the. In that case, if those two are communicating on RPC, the server can look into its configuration. It could go down and find the configuration file on the FTP server and then set the policies to it. But there are a lot of different FTP servers out there. It's also a complex case for the tool to support all FTP servers."
"It is not so easy to use and configure. It needs a bunch of further resources to work, which is mainly the biggest downside of it. The deployment is huge."
"It has an uninviting interface."
"There was a controversy when Cisco reduced the amount of data they kept, and the solution became quite cost-intensive, which made its adoption challenging….Although they have modified it now, I preferred the previous version, and I wish all the functionality were back under the same product."
"The emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved."
More Cisco Secure Workload cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is highly competitive and advantageous, offering great value."
"The tool's monthly costs have undergone a significant reduction, dropping from approximately 12,000 euros to around 4,000. This represents a cost reduction of over 60 percent. However, it's essential to note that while costs decreased in some areas, they increased in others due to shifts in our environment. As our overall environment has grown, currently connecting 50 accounts to the cloud, it's challenging to directly compare costs with the state of our setup three years ago."
"They're a little high in price. The price could be lower."
"Generally, it has been fine for me. I can find my way around the price list, and it is pretty simple."
"We got discounts on pricing."
"It is the most expensive part of the product. There is a lot of room for improvement. Security comes with a price, but it is still a big chunk just for the service."
"The product's licensing costs are yearly."
"CloudGuard Network Security is not too cheap."
More Check Point CloudGuard Network Security pricing and cost advice
"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."
"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."
"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."
"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."
"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."
"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."
"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
26%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?
The tool's most valuable feature is its management console.
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?
Pricing in Jamaica is a major issue, with users often citing it as a reason for not using Check Point.
See all answers
What needs improvement with Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?
They could improve the documentation. The interface is fine for me since I have been using it for some time.
See all answers
What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?
The product provides multiple-device integration.
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?
CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discovery. This raises questions about the resources required to discover and write po...
See all answers
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, provid...
See all answers
 

Comparisons

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Compared 19% of the time
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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security
April 2025
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security reportDownload Check Point CloudGuard Network Security product report
Buyer's Guide
Cisco Secure Workload
April 2025
Cisco Secure Workload reportDownload Cisco Secure Workload product report
 

Also Known As

CloudGuard IaaS, Check Point vSEC, CloudGuard IaaS, Check Point Virtual Systems, Check Point CloudGuard Network Security
Cisco Tetration
 

Overview

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is designed to secure cloud assets, offering robust firewall capabilities and protection for both internal and external traffic across AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments.

Enterprises rely on Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for comprehensive network protection, threat prevention, and compliance enforcement. Supporting virtual machines and hybrid environments, it delivers advanced security measures including intrusion prevention and application control. Key functions include firewall security, network segmentation, and cloud environment protection, ensuring businesses maintain a secure and compliant IT infrastructure.

What are the most valuable features of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?
  • Flexible Architecture: Adaptable to diverse cloud and on-premises environments.
  • UTM Capabilities: Unified Threat Management delivering multi-layered security.
  • Advanced Threat Prevention: Includes IPS, application control, and anti-malware.
  • Auto-scaling: Automatically adjusts capacity based on traffic and demand.
  • Comprehensive Threat Prevention: Protects against known and unknown threats.
  • Ease of Use: Streamlined deployment and management processes.
  • Integration with Cloud Platforms: Seamlessly works with AWS, Azure, and other clouds.
  • Centralized Management: Single-pane-of-glass visibility and control.
  • User Identity Awareness: Enhances security policies based on user identities.
  • Zero-touch Deployment: Simplifies initial setup and deployment.
What benefits and ROI can users expect from Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?
  • Email Protection: Shields email communications from threats.
  • Anti-malware: Guards against malicious software.
  • Single-pane-of-glass Visibility: Provides a unified view for better security management.
  • Scalability: Grows with the business needs.
  • Seamless Cloud Transition: Eases the move from on-premises to cloud environments.

In industries such as financial services, healthcare, retail, and education, Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is implemented to safeguard sensitive data, ensure compliance, and protect critical infrastructure. Companies in these sectors benefit from its advanced threat prevention and flexible deployment options, meeting their stringent security requirements while enabling secure digital transformation.

Check Point Software Technologies

Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

Reviews from Real Users

“The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

Cisco
 

Sample Customers

Physicians Choice Laboratory Services, Helvetica Insurance
ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)
Buyer's Guide
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload
April 2025
Free Report: Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload
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