Check Point Application Control Reviews

Check Point Application Control enables my team to customize websites to fit our daily needs. It provides security measures that can be set in place to safeguard our content and internal information. 

It provides reliable tools for setting up HTTPS security policies that prevent security risks related to SSL protocol. The product provides real-time insights into the data traffic from the applications and their performance. 

The security protocols have enabled my team to set restrictions for accessing confidential information.

There is efficient protection of data and workflows from external interferences. This platform provides basic tools for protecting applications from cyber attacks and building strong websites. 

The SmartView tracker enables my members to monitor data traffic across the applications. It has provided a great opportunity for us to set up basic rules for interacting with applications. 

This product provides reliable data controls that monitor the performance and operational capability of all the applications within the company's networking infrastructure.

The central management system provides a reliable platform for application control and URL filtering. 

The security gateways have set comprehensive security tools for protecting data from malware attacks. 

The application library can run many apps and websites at the same time without functional complications. 

The application control system blocks internet sites and cyber attacks that can affect daily operations. 

SmartEvent Analysis provides capabilities for understanding application performance with charts and reporting analytics.

The most set features have enhanced the effective management of workflows. 

Malware threats can advance attacks when there are no timely measures to curb online phishing attacks. 

The solution needs an efficient monitoring platform that provides individual employee data, and performance will boost productivity in the organization. 

Most features perform well since there are few complaints. The security tools should be empowered more to fit daily demands and prevent our systems from advanced threats. 

I recommend the use of this platform to other organizations for reliable application performance.

I've used the solution for two years. 

The application security controls and monitoring tools are powerful.

I am impressed by its great performance.

The customer support staff has been reliable and committed to great service delivery.

Positive

I have not worked with a similar solution.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The implementation was done by the vendor team, and their level of expertise is excellent.

The recorded ROI has improved from 40% to 65% currently.

The setup cost and licensing terms are efficient.

I evaluated other application control products, however, Check Point Application Control was the best.

This is great system for monitoring application performance and I recommend to others.

We use Check Point Application Control to control VPN and bandwidth. 

The tool's most valuable features are VPN access, website defense, and maintenance. 

Check Point Application Control needs to ensure that they release up-to-date security patches regularly. It should release better documentation so end-users can use the product without depending on the support team. 

I have been working with the product for three years. 

Check Point Application Control's stability is good. 

The tool is scalable. My company has 1000 users. 

The tool's support is good. 

Positive

You need guidance to do the product's deployment. It cannot be done directly. You need two people to handle the deployment. 

Check Point Application Control is expensive. The tool's licensing costs are yearly. 

I rate the product an eight out of ten. 

The primary use case for application control in our organization is to provide the ability to restrict users from using unapproved applications and applications that fall under categories that are deemed malicious. 

Application control is enabled on all of our HA firewall clusters globally. Leveraging identity awareness, we can restrict remote access applications from the rest of the organization, allowing it for specific teams that require it, i.e., IT Helpdesk and Technical Support teams.

Application Control has improved our organization by enabling other network administrators and me to restrict non-corporate applications for specific departments. 

Combined with Check Points URL filtering, this blade provides more granular restriction as if the firewall engine does not detect the application, administrators have the ability to use regular expressions to block URLs that are critical for the application to function. For example, the Windows Quick Assist tool needed URL filtering as it was not being detected and categorized as "Remote Assistance"

The ability to be able to do dynamic rate limiting on specific applications has been a valuable feature. 

This has allowed us to prevent our graphics team from saturating our link to the internet by rate-limiting their uploads to third-party cloud providers (i.e., Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc.). 

The fact that application control also can stop browser-based extensions/widgets has also been very valuable as it has provided insight to employees installing VPN extensions on their browsers. 

This blade is very valuable to any organization, and it is great that it is included in the base firewall licensing bundle. 

It is very easy to set up and configure. The one feature that could be improved would be the ability to see implicit rules that are defaulted on the policy. For example, if the cleanup rule is removed, there is still another toggle in the settings that (in the event the traffic does not match any of the rules) you can either choose to block the traffic or allow it. By default, this setting is configured to drop, which caused issues the first time we configured the policy as this was not shown.

I've used the solution for five years.

The solution is stable and hasn't increased the load drastically.

Scalability is excellent and is easy to add new sites.

Technical support is hit or miss. L1 and L2 never seem to be able to solve my issues. We always need to go to L3 support.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

The solution should be configured by default with an allow rule that can be changed to drop once implemented to avoid massive disruptions to users.

We handled the solution in-house.

The ROI we see is in the added security to block specific applications or categories.

The setup is easy. However if first implemented, it's a good idea to add a "clean up" rule at the bottom rather than denying. This will allow the traffic and you can further tweak rules without impacting users.

We did not evaluate other options. 

The product is great.

It is one of the main solutions that we have applied in our offices for the administrative control of access to specific services social networks within the corporation, viewing of videos or services that in some way distract the worker from their activities. It's also facilitated us with the ability to separate the databases by a gateway which makes the administration and the permissions granted to the end-users much easier.

One of the ways it's helped us improve was in the administration and the permissions for specific services. This was very useful to us when making a database per gateway and configuring them through layers to have better visualization, control, and administration of the rules, which allows new administrators to have a better scope and understanding of the organization. This has undoubtedly been the newest thing for us as gateways administrators.

One of the aspects of the solution that has given us more value is the integration of a domain controller with the firewall through the dashboard which allows that through inline layers, LDAP.

The visualization of users, the administration, and the permissions that we can grant to users makes our configuration a more dynamic environment since, as organizational units of an active directory, we can grant permissions to users to specific applications allowed through the URL filtering or application control within the dashboard.

With Check Point we are more protected, however, one of the issues is the cost. They are expensive products due to the fact that we have to buy blades for each solution that we want to integrate into our corporate. Without a doubt, it is worth it, however, it is an important point that could be considered. 

Likewise, nowadays a 2MFA solution could be integrated to Check Point since nowadays remote connections made with remote workers are required to protect the extension from the office to your home through a VPN connection.

I've used the solution for about three years.

The Check Point solution is very stable, however, the installation of JHF at least once a month is somewhat annoying since that could be interpreted as not being a stable solution.

In terms of scalability, my impressions have always been good since there is a lot of scalability in this service. For example, you can integrate several solutions to a centralized administration.

They have an excellent support team. They are fast and it is easy to escalate any situation.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

The setup was straightforward.

We handle the implementation in-house.

We've seen a 40% ROI.

Despite the somewhat high cost, based on the blades, it is a reliable solution.

We didn't evaluate other solutions.

Application control is part of the administration of Check Point management. We use it to provide protection and access to applications and sites in a safe way on the computers that are protected by our gateways.

The use of this feature has been very important for perimeter protection through our gateways, it is fairly simple to use for the protection of specific applications and sites. This is in addition to the fact that these controls can be applied in a granular way from a network to a specific host which is incredible for the security administration of any company.

Check Point Application Control is a powerful tool and has given us the protection that we needed for our business. We are now able to secure ourselves internally.

Without the use of this tool, we had suffered from the use of applications not allowed within the company. This generated the loss of effective time for our employees, in addition to generating major security problems due to the use of applications that generated cyber threats that affected the operation of the company.

Thanks to Check Point Application Control we are able to control these vulnerabilities and provide both greater employee productivity and greater perimeter security.

We loved Check Point Application Control for its granular control and ability to apply policies between groups, hosts and networks depending on the need.

On the other hand, the integration of our AppWiki with a large number of preloaded applications in segments helps to apply policies more easily and effectively.

The integration with Check Point Security Management and Check Point Security Gateway potentiates the company's perimeter security. This is a truly powerful feature and it is easy to implement.

Check Point is a fairly complete security vendor, however, we would like to have a better SLA for technical support issues, sometimes they take a long time to resolve customer issues.

On the other hand, the documentation is not always as clear as we would like it to be, it takes a long time to review it and implement solutions with the best practices of the manufacturer.

Finally, their costs are high, I think they could improve and make it more competitive against the competition, even if they are better protection tool.

Previously, we had only used applications that generated this protection as a test, however, they did not meet our expectations like Check Point.

Our recommendation to other clients is to have a partner that helps them with the company's requirements in addition to the costs.

We did validate proofs of concept from other manufacturers, but we liked the Check Point's protection more.

Our company works in the area of developing and delivering online gambling platforms. The Check Point Next-Generation Firewalls are the core security solution we use for the protection of our DataCenter environment located in Asia (Taiwan). The environment has about ~50 physical servers as virtualization hosts, and we have two HA Clusters consist of 2x5400 hardware appliances, managed by an OpenServer Security Management Server on a Virtual Machine (KVM), all running on R80.10 with the latest JumboHotfix. The Application Control software blade is one of the numerous blades activated on the NGFWs and serves for the security improvement in the application detection, categorization, and filtration.

The overall security of the environment has been greatly improved by the Check Point NGFWs. Before implementing the Check Point solutions, we relied on the Cisco ACLs and Zone-Based firewalls configured on the switches and routers, which in fact a simple stateful firewall, and currently appear to be not an efficient solution for protecting from the advanced threats. The Check Point Application control-blade significantly increased the security level from the standpoint of application visibility and filtration. The blade was easy to enable and configure, and we don't see any performance penalty after the activation of it. 

1. The built-in database of the applications, software and the protocols is just amazing - there are more than 8 thousands available just after the blade application. In comparison, the Cisco Network-Based Application Recognition (NBAR) available on the routers provides like 200 applications.

2. The application are categorized into group based on the purpose, like messengers, databases, games etc., and such group objects may be directly use in the Security Policies for the NGFWs.

3. It it really simple to add new custom application definitions and groups if you need so (we use such an option for our own developed software on non-standard ports).

4. The visibility is just great. For any security event of the Application Control blade there is a relevant log entry with all the application details (but don't forget to enable logging for the security rule in the Policy).

I think that the pricing for the Check Point products should be reconsidered - we found it to be quite expensive to purchase and to maintain (the licenses and the support services need to be prolonged regularly), or create some additional bundles of the software blades with significant discounts in addition to the current Next Generation Threat Prevention & SandBlast (NGTX) and Next Generation Threat Prevention (NGTP) offers.

We also had several support cases opened for software issues, but none of them were connected with the Application Control blade.

We have been using the Check Point Application Control for about three years, starting in late 2017.

The Application Control software blade is stable.

The Application Control software blade scales well with the gateways we use, since it doesn't affect the overall performance much after activation.

We have had several support cases opened, but none of them were connected with the Application Control software blade. Some of the issue were resolved by installing the latest recommended JumoHotfix, some required additional configuration on OS kernel level. The longest issue took about one month to be resolved, which we consider too long.

We used the ACLs and Zone-Based firewalls with NBAR on the Cisco switches, routers, and found that this approach doesn't provide sufficient security protection against the modern advanced threats.

The setup was straightforward. The configuration was easy and understandable - we relied heavily on the built-in objects and groups.

In-house team - we have a Check Point Certified engineer working in the engineering team.

Choosing the correct set of the licenses is essential - without the additional software blade licenses purchased the Check Point gateways are just stateful firewall.

We didn't evaluate other vendors or solutions.

Check Point has provided us with a Check Point management server tool where we manage our Gateways. It helped us limit the applications, sites, and different actions that are part of the users' daily lives. We can limit with granularly the applications that users access.  

Segmentation is key. We managed to divide everything by department to be able to generate the security that each one requires. Now, managers have greater flexibility.

This product or feature included in our security admin has helped us a lot to be able to control our users. It helps us with effectiveness since users can use laptops correctly, being more productive.

It has also been possible to avoid modern threats that can enter and attack user equipment, servers, and the business network. These attacks would affect work continuity in addition to company data that could be affected.

The most important characteristic is granularity, which allows our teams to have different security profiles depending on the department to be protected.

There is also a list of applications pre-loaded in the systems to be able to have blocks or permissions to use different applications.

Finally, the licensing of our Check Point gateways, which are not licensed separately, provides an advantage.

Check Point licenses are somewhat expensive, in addition to the fact that it is difficult to validate their costs without a Check Point partner - which is why it is difficult to validate them.

Support is only available in the English language, which affects some regions where Check Point products will be used.

The SLAs of checkpoint products are sometimes not met since the cases created are sometimes attended to very late after opening them.                     

We have used this solution for at least five years in its different versions. It has helped us a lot with business security.

We have not previously used any product like this.

The costs should be reviewed with a partner of Check Point. As for the implementation, it is really simple.

Several proofs of concepts were carried out, and Check Point was the best.

This is an excellent product.

In our company, when acquiring CKPOINT products to be able to have perimeter protection for our teams, both cloud and on-premise.

we are able to carry out greater protection with Check Point's gateway, integrated with access control. It is a great help.

Check Point Application Control has been of great help in being able to provide access and granular security improvements for different departments with different profiles within the company. It is important to be able to do this in environments that deserve greater control in different areas.

We gained a lot in control, however, also through the reports it was possible to determine what was happening, and subsequently, make security improvements in the application control blade. Its use is really simple and intuitive, and when we have had doubts we have relied on the public documentation.

One of the advantages of Check Point Application Control is the large number of profiles included within the tool to be able to generate granular policies, in addition to permissions between servers or even web access.

Its implementation is simple. It is another great advantage. In our case, we use it with our R81 Check Point Gateway. It was implemented in Microsoft Azure, being a virtual device.

On the other hand, the log reports are very good for making validations and decisions.

Something important to mention is the improvement at the support level. It could be more advanced. Sometimes the responses are somewhat slow or based on a schedule that is not always the same as the companies. It's difficult to generate a session with them to better explain your needs.

We would also like the costs to be more comfortable. Although they are not different from other security tools, they could have improvements to provide greater interest to customers who are interested or loyal to Check Point's products.

In the company, we have made security improvements in recent years to be able to solve technological gaps in which vulnerabilities could greatly damage work continuity. Application control is a great help for our gateways.

Previously we had used Fortinet Gateways, however we liked what Check Point offered better at the level of modern security tools.

It is very important before implementing security improvements to have a test environment to evaluate correctly. I recommend taking previous implementations into account.

Before opting for Check Point, we validated and verified several demos with other manufacturers, however, we liked it better and it was better adapted to our internal needs.