Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) Reviews

As a company, we are a value-added reseller. We have to use it first before we can propose it to our clients. We have to give it a clean bill of health before we can actually propose this to the client. We have to conduct a proof of concept, which runs for around 30 days. The client has to give the okay before we can actually deploy it for them.

Clients have been using it and they haven't had any negative feedback. 

The initial setup is straightforward.

The product is scalable.

We find the stability to be quite good.

Check Point is one of the few solutions that pay attention to cloud security. Many others mostly focus on providing on-premises solutions.

To be honest, we don't have many clients who have taken CloudGuard, as the feedback has not been that great. There are a few clients who have taken the CloudGuard due to the fact that there is a lot of competition in terms of endpoint protection from Trend Micro and other leading vendors. 

There are few clients who have CloudGuard and the response is quite positive. However, it comes down to dealing with the challenge of when the client needs both protection for workstations and their physical and virtual servers. With Check Point, we don't have that ability. They have just CloudGuard, which protects the workstations and servers. With other vendors, there's a separation between the endpoint protection for workstations and for the servers and then something else for the virtual environment. The challenge comes in when you're trying to propose this to the client. They'll ask you how they can be sure that this will protect their virtual or physical data centers collectively, and also protect the workstations.

Most clients nowadays tend to move to the cloud and their data security is key. If CloudGuard could be able to give the client that full visibility of how their data is protected on the cloud, then that would be a great selling point for Check Point.

Generally, visibility is the issue. Clients really just need more visibility to know they are protected. 

We find the stability to be good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The scalability is there if a company needs to expand it. 

Technical support is okay. It's average. The local support is good, however, now when you go to global support, there's a bit of a challenge. It takes time compared to other vendors. Their global support is not that active. I have some clients who have been complaining that they raise a technical issue and it takes maybe one or two days before they get any feedback. 

That said, here, in terms of technical support, the local Kenyan support is very good. They're quite supportive.

I also work with Sophos, Fortinet, and Palo Alto. 

The other vendors, they're not doing that well in terms of cloud security, as they tend to concentrate on on-prem security. The physical security, that's at the endpoint level. However, Check Point is doing quite well in terms of cloud security. 

The initial setup is not overly complex. It's quite simple and straightforward.

The solution is expensive. If I rate Check Point, Sophos, Fortinet, and Palo Alto, Sophos comes in at a cost that is pretty low. Then Fortinet, and then Palo Alto. Check Point is at the edge. It's a bit expensive or it's quite expensive. When you are trying to propose Check Point, it's more of an OpEX and even a CapEx project. It cannot go through a normal request for a quotation. It has to be a CapEx project. At the beginning of every financial year, a customer or end-user has to consider this to be able to purchase a Check Point firewall.

For most Check Point CloudGuards, it's not actually deployed on the private cloud of the end-user. They usually deploy it on the public cloud.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. The clients who are using it have nothing bad to say about its capabilities. 

I'd recommend the solution. They are doing quite unique workarounds with cloud security while many others are more focused on on-premises.

We use a hybrid environment, so we have an on-premise data center and branch offices as well as resources in the cloud. On-premise is secured with different Check Point Gateways while for our security in the cloud we use Check Point Cloud Guard.

Depending on the traffic, we use different Cloud Guard firewalls. External traffic is handled by using a scale-set that can adapt on the fly to increase/decrease the number of firewall instances.

Internal traffic is handled by a normal Cloud Guard HA cluster with a certain amount of cores.

We used the Cloud Guard technology quite early on and used Check Point's Blueprint for our Cloud Datacenter design. By being able to use real firewalls instead of the cloud's own IP tables/inferior IPS we're able to maintain security across the whole environment (on-premise and cloud).

With the possibility to administer the cloud firewalls within the same management as on-premise firewalls, we can use the same objects/networks instead of having two sets of object databases or scripting something to have both of them synched.

Having the whole environment be under the same management is definitely is a plus.

Using a scale set to increase/decrease the amount of firewalls in the cloud helps with saving costs in the long run, as they will only increase if traffic increases and therefore saving us on licensing costs. For a normal Cloud Guard you pay for each core, so using the SS you don't have to fully size and pay for the maximum amount of traffic.

It's possible to sync the Check Point Management with the cloud portal, therefore allowing automated rules to be set in place whenever creating a new VM.

In the first phase, Cloud Guard Firewalls didn't allow minor and major upgrades. Fortunately, now you can install normal hotfixes and minor upgrades (JHF) on the Cloud firewalls. For major upgrades, it's still necessary to destroy the VMs and re-create them again. Doing that would mean new public IPs as well. We created a script for that. I still hope that major upgrades will be possible in the near future too, otherwise, you still have to script a lot for basic maintenance, instead of using tools like CDT.

The product is very scalable due to using the scale-set.

I have been using Check Point CloudGuard for 3 years now. I use it in the financial sector, and use the gateways for perimeter security, east-west traffic inspections, and internet access. We have gateways for production, development, and outbound (internet access). The blades for IPS, FW, And URL filtering have been enabled with no problems. All the gateways are stable. We mostly use it for VPN site to site, and we can establish VPNs with Azure and other services. 

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security has established communications with other devices and other cloud providers. CloudGuard has improved the passage of CIS and PCI regulations. The functions for autoscaling save costs for the company and the centralized management helps us with administration. CloudGuard complements the security model of the company. We only need one solution for all cloud providers as it offers good compatibility with lots of protection. the easy funtion of use the licence core in other gateways helmpe to save cost. And the easy VPN configuration helpme to stablish more than 100 VPN in an shortly time.

The most valuable features are the VPN Blade, IPS Blade, URL filtering, and Applications Control Blade. They help me to align with any compliance or regulations within our financial sector. The VPN blade has helped me to establish tactical communications. The logs help with troubleshooting and they are great. The IPS blade helps me to meet regulations and protect against intrusion. The applications control makes it easy to configure and created profiles. It blocks all the non-authorized applications. 

CheckPoint CloudGuard could be better at solving cases. In many cases, the client should be able to request or obtain a sufficient explanation or to obtain an appropriate answer. Check Point should improve the queue clients need to go through to obtain access to direct support chat. This should be for users with privileged access.  

CheckPoint features that should be included in the next release include the possibility to create a cluster on AWS and a Multi-region Cluster. They need to also include the possibility to use a managed web portal. 

I've been using the solution for about 3 years.

The scalability is very good.

Technical support is very good.

The initial setup is easy.

The team that helped us was very good.

The ROI we've had has been very good.

We had a big problem with how to protect our host services, which are directly accessed via the cloud. We wanted to protect our organization tenant and workload from any next-generation attack. For this protection, we implemented the Check Point solution named CloudGuard Network.

This NGFW is provided by Check Point and has all of the capabilities that are required to protect against next-generation attacks at the perimeter level.

The modules or security features that we use are provided as part of the base license. These include VPN, IPS, Application Control, and Content Awareness. Together, these are strong and help to protect the organization.

This solution effectively protects us against any next-generation attack.

The most valuable feature is the centralized dashboard, which is used for managing all of the Check Point Security Gateways.

Whether it is hosted on-premises or on the cloud with the NGTX license, it provides additional security capabilities such as SandBlast, which is able to extract and emulate file execution in a virtual sandbox. It will identify activity and actions, and the system can be configured accordingly.

It provides hyperscaling capabilities for both on-premises and cloud-based security gateways. An on-premises security gateway can be configured for hyperscaling using the Maestro 140 or Maestro 170. In the cloud, on AWS it can be hyper-scaled using the AWS gateway load balancer.

It's able to protect against advanced threats and prevent zero-day attacks using both SandBlast and IPS signatures.

Throughput is impacted drastically once the security modules are enabled on the firewall.

As it is a software-based firewall, there is no dedicated throughput available for each module.

In case the device is inaccessible due to some issue such as CPU or memory, there is no separate port or hardware partition provided for troubleshooting purposes.

Throughput on the virtual firewall is an issue in case the organization wants to migrate a workload to the cloud, and it becomes a bottleneck.

We have been using the Check Point CloudGuard Network for between two and five years.

The combination of NGFW + URL Filtering + Antivirus + Anti Bot, with 8 vCore D4 v2, is able to provide a throughput of 4Gbps.

On Azure, the combination of NGFW + URL Filtering + Anit Virus + Anit Bot, with 8vCore c5n 2xlarge, is able to provide a throughput of 4.7Gbps. It is similar to AWS.

We are a small consulting company. We have around 100 employees. We don't use advanced firewalls because we don't really have important data that can be hacked. Nobody is going to care about our data because it's only the HR department's timesheet data on our on-premise systems. The firewall is protecting remote access, allowing the employees to access our office environment. So sometimes employees connect to our systems which have some test systems on it. They run some tests about the consulting we've given to clients. That's all. We just have basic things on our firewall. Just two things are important for us - the site to site VPN, which we have with some customers, and the government site. That is important. That's why I want to change the firewall to a new and up-to-date one so maybe it will be an improvement to prevent some hackers.

After I made up my mind to migrate it to another solution, I was kind of checking all the other firewalls, the FortiGate, Check Point, pfSense and OPNsense, and Check Point has pretty simple solutions, like the virtual appliance which you just download and it is imported into VMware and you just start using it. You just have to know Check Point's GUI so you can manage your IP addresses and access rules and stuff. But as I said, Check Point is really advanced and the GUI is kind of advanced, which the customer reports actually prove.

In terms of what could be improved, we have no support with the current Check Point environment. It ended maybe three or four years ago. Because it's an appliance you have to have support. That's a problem for us because I cannot update it at the moment. We have to have another support. We have to subscribe to another support so I can update it. I think it's a good amount of money and our boss does not want to pay that kind of money for firewall solutions. It's not a hardware solution, which by the way, if it would be up to me, I would migrate it to a hardware FortiGate system because all our customers at the moment are migrating their environments to FortiGate hardware solutions. They say it's a really good improvement from their previous firewall solution because it's easy to manage and they're very happy with it.

But as I said before, my boss does not want to pay a lot of money for a firewall solution since we don't have much data to protect and the data is not very important. It's not a big use for us. So we will just probably try pfSense or OPNsense. I can patch it to an up-to-date version, like the 2021 patch. We have the open source solution because my boss does not want to pay for it. It's my approach to migrate the firewall, actually. If it was up to me, I'd probably migrate it to a FortiGate system.

I'm not very experienced with Check Point. But what I would like to see is a step-by-step initial installation of the firewall. That would be really helpful. Like in Oracle appliances, when you start it asks you, what's your current IP address? An initial setup should be a step by step and intuitive process. You click on "begin," it asks you some simple questions. You fill in the blanks - your current IP address, what you want to do, if you want to set up a site to site VPN, for example, that kind of thing. That would be the smartest thing to have.

I can't give it any review about Check Point technical support because I am only working here for about three years and by the time I started at the company it already did not have support.

I have no idea about the initial setup, but it seems like it's not so complex. The initial set up is probably not that hard, but not that easy, either. If I were to delegate the firewall system to a junior guy, I think that he's not going to manage Check Point, but he'll probably manage FortiGate.

In the past, my clients were all using Check Point Systems. When I reviewed it at that time, back 10 years ago, Check Point was number one, as far as I remember, meaning FortiGate wasn't a major solution in Turkey. Nobody was talking about FortiGate then. Now FortiGate, is a major player in the firewall industry in Turkey. Most of our clients are migrating to FortiGate because they say it's cheaper than Check Point. So when I see the Check Point's GUI, it's really complicated. My recommendation would be for Check Point customers to first learn about Check Point's GUI, which is pretty advanced, for me at least.

But when I talk to my friends who are managing IT, they are migrating to FortiGate. They say, FortiGate is very easy to manage and I should really think about it now. When I was first introduced to Check Point it was really advanced. I didn't understand when I first looked into it. I just wanted a solution. pfSense has the same problem. By the way, according to your report, some customers said that pfSense needs improvement on the management and the GUI and aspects like that, so maybe I'll need another review of OPNsense versus Check Point and FortiGate etc...

We didn't have any problems at all. Just in one case, actually. We have a rule that pops up from nowhere which we didn't create. When we restart our Virtual System firewall, it creates a rule which messes up all our internet connection. So if I were to give a number from one to 10, I would probably say Check Point is a nine out of 10. Other than that, we haven't had any problems. Check Point is pretty reliable. I think it's our company's problem that we couldn't patch it after it froze. Maybe an up to date, patched version doesn't have this problem. 

Overall, it's really working for us. I don't have any problems other than it's just outdated.

We primarily use the solution when clients are for searching in the servers. We compare the solutions or servers that are available and we seek out new features for the new solutions for our customers. We're solution providers. This is one of the products we offer.

The solution, overall, has worked very well for our organization.

The reliability of the product is excellent.

The configuration capabilities are very good.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The capability and the response, in terms of the time of response of the transactions, is very important for my customers. It's something they need to continuously work on to make it better.

The memory and hard disk capability could be strengthened.

The product should integrate next-generation firewall features such as anti-spam and anti-spoofing.

I've been using the solution for 20 years or so. It's been a long time.

While the stability is okay, the servers could use more RAM memory.

In general, the scalability is good. If a company needs to expand the solution, it should be able to do so.

We typically work with medium-sized organizations. In some of the companies, there are as many as 1,000 users.

Technical support has been good. We don't have any complaints so far. If a customer needs to reach out to them, they can do so.

The initial setup isn't too difficult. It's rather straightforward. A company should have too many issues getting it set up properly.

The deployment process is quick and easy. It takes maybe an hour or two. It's not a long time.

In my company, we have 20 people that manage the deployment and maintenance for our clients. You only really need two to manage everything.

Check Point has moderate pricing. It's not the most expensive, however, it's also not the cheapest. Typically, when clients are looking for a solution, it comes down to the price.

Typically, our clients will also look at Palo Alto as an option. However, typically, it is more expensive.

Clients may also look at Fortinet products, which are a bit less. Check Point tends to sit in between the two in terms of pricing.

We're solutions providers. We're partners with Check Point. We offer integrations and support. This is one of the products we offer to our clients.

We're using the latest version of the solution. The platform is R80.40. It's deployed on VMware's virtual environment.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations. The likelihood of running into issues is low.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've largely been satisfied with the product.

It is building the network infrastructure for our cloud environment around it. Primarily, the functionality that we are using it for is the firewall piece in the cloud.

We have three different things going on right now. I think Dome9 is considered a part of the whole CloudGuard thing. We have AWS and Azure environments behind just straight up Check Point Firewalls. We are in the midst of deploying a new network in AWS that fully leverages the whole IaaS that they offer. Primarily, it's the firewall main piece. However, we are transitioning into using the scale-up, scale-down gateways, which are mostly the network security piece of it.

The granularity and visibility that we are able to get into logging and data going into our AWS environment is significantly more than we could get purely out of the native AWS tools. That is big for alerting and incident response.

The Auto Scaling functionality is the most valuable feature. Our cloud environments are growing to the point where we need to be able to expand and contract to the size of the environment at will. They pull you to the cloud. With the static environment that we currently have stood up, it works well. However, it would be more efficient having the Auto Scaling even bigger. We are in the middle of that now, but I can already tell you that will be the most impressive thing that we're doing.

CloudGuard's block rate, malware prevention rate, and exploit resistance rate are tremendous. CloudGuard is functionally equivalent to what we are doing on-prem. It's easy to manage CloudGuard from on-prem and offers the same protection that we're able to give the rest of our environments, which is a big plus for us.

The comprehensiveness of the CloudGuard’s threat prevention security is great, especially once they integrate Dome9 in the whole thing. That really ties the whole thing together, so you can tie your entire cloud environment together into one central location, which is nice. Previously, we had three or four different tools that we were trying to leverage to do the same stuff that we are able to do with CloudGuard.

I might be a little skewed because I have been working with Check Point for so long that a lot of the same logic and language that the rest of Check Point uses becomes intuitive, but I haven't had any issues. Anything we need to get done, we are able to do it relatively easily.

The room for improvement wouldn't necessarily be with CloudGuard as much as it would be with the services supported by Check Point. A lot of the documentation that Check Point has in place is largely because of the nature of the cloud. However, it is frequently outdated and riddled with bad links. It has been kind of hard to rely on the documentation. You end up having to work with support engineers on it. Something is either not there or wrong. Some of it is good, but frequently it's a rabbit hole of trying to figure out the good information from the bad.

We use the solution’s native support for AWS Transit Gateway and are integrating it with the Auto Scaling piece now, which is a big portion of it. One of the issues with using the AWS Transit Gateway functionality is that setting up the ingress firewall can be more of a logging type function, as opposed to doing pure, classic firewall functionality. This is with the design that we are using with the Auto Scaling. However, AWS announced about two weeks ago that they have a new feature coming out that will effectively enable us to start blocking on the Check Point side, and with our previous deployment before, we weren't able to do that. While the Check Point side is fine, the functionality that AWS allowed us to use was more of the issue. But now that changes are occurring on the AWS side, those will enable us to get the full use out of the things that we have.

We have been using it since before it was even called CloudGuard, which has probably been five years now.

The stability is great. There are no real issues with it. Even when half of AWS went down last week at some point, our stuff stayed up. Check Point is actually fine, it's more of just whether or not AWS is going to stay alive.

The scalability is great. That is the big thing. We went from our existing not-that-scalable network to a full scale-up, scale-down. I feel like it's inherently scalable because of that. It gives you as much power or as little power as you need.

Currently, there are about 150 users in our organization. When the new deployment is done, there will be about 700 users. Right now, it is primarily software development. These are the people who are in there now spinning up and down servers, building out environments, etc. It's just going to be that on a larger scale once the new deployments are out there. We need to have the guardrails in place with CloudGuard and Dome9 to ensure that they don't wreck the company, but it's mainly software development and the various roles inside of that, like architecture. There are a hundred different teams in the company that do dev, so they each have their little functions that they would have to do in there.

Right now, the solution is lightly used, given the fact that most of our development is taking place on-prem. However, we are eventually moving everything to the cloud. By virtue of that fact, it will be heavily used for the next two to three years.

Support has been great. They will get you through any issue.

The documentation has been rough. Being able to do it yourself can be hit or miss given the constraints of the documentation.

We deployed our AWS environment in tandem with our CloudGuard deployment. There were individual pieces of AWS that we were using that we've replaced with CloudGuard, but those pieces were more on the Dome9 side than anything, like flow log exports, that we were able to consolidate back into Dome9 and CloudGuard.

The initial setup is generally complex. I have been doing cloud and Check Point stuff for a while. Therefore, when we deployed this stuff, I had a good understanding of how to negotiate both of them. That being said, I can see how a user who doesn't have this level of experience may see it as being difficult. I just have a lot of experience with this stuff and was able to get it stood up relatively easily. But, if you're not in the weeds with Check Point and AWS, then I can definitely see it being complex to set up, especially given the issues with documentation, etc.

The first deployment without Auto Scaling was probably about a month. It was kind of in tandem with building out the cloud environment. Our latest deployment was about two months, but it has been a significantly more complex design that we were doing, so it was sort of expected. It was not a full-time thing that we're doing. We were working on it a little at a time. If a team already had their AWS environment fully designed and operational, then they could have it up in a week. A lot of our challenges have been just tied to the organization and changing what it wanted out of the deployment, which has been more an internal issue for us.

Initially, our implementation strategy was a multicloud deployment. Then, it switched to a single cloud. After that, it shifted to the number of environments that we had to get stood up. So, it has been a bit all over the place internally. We know we have to do it, it was just a question of how many networks did we need to stand up, how many environments, etc. From a managerial leadership perspective, it was just telling us what they want.

Largely because we are a large Check Point shop who used on-prem going into it, most things are identical between the cloud and on-prem deployments. So, the things that we were able to do on-prem, we were then able to easily extend those out to the cloud.

We use Check Point’s Unified Security Management to manage CloudGuard in multiple public clouds and existing on-premises appliances. We had it in place before we had CloudGuard. Therefore, it was an easy transition to integrate that stuff. It wasn't that we had something else in place, then we brought in CloudGuard. We had the Smart Management Suite already set up on the internal end, and we were able to integrate that pretty easily.

99 percent of the time, we are doing the deployment ourselves. Here and there, we will have a one-off, but we do the deployment ourselves.

There are three of us who were involved in the deployment, which are the same people who are doing the maintenance.

The ROI is significant. We definitely would need more people on this team to manage this stuff if we were not using Check Point. The cost of having more security engineers and cloud engineers, in particular, is expensive. It prevents us from having to blow money on people who are just staring at the cloud all day.

The use of Check Point’s Unified Security Management to manage CloudGuard in multiple public clouds and existing on-premises appliances has freed up our security engineers to perform more important tasks. If we were tied down using four or five different tools, that would be a nightmare for us because we are just a small team. There are about three of us managing the cloud environments right now. If not for this solution, we would easily double or triple our team size. The number of different tools needed to manage (without CloudGuard) would be too much for just three of us.

The pricing and licensing have been good. We just had to do a license increase for our portion of it. We had that done within a couple of days. Given the fact that it's purely a software-based license, it ends up being even quicker than doing it for an on-prem firewall.

The only other thing that might come up is if we ever decided to do any managed services type of thing or bring in consultants. Outside of that, their cost is what it is upfront. This is outside of whatever you will end up paying AWS to run the servers. It is all pretty straightforward.

We kind of always knew it was going to be Check Point because of our extensive on-prem deployment. It just seemed easier for us to just stay with them instead of having multiple firewall providers. The only other real option for us at the time was just going with native AWS firewalls, but we would rather keep that managed ourselves with Check Point.

The only thing that we ever looked at or compared CloudGuard to is just native AWS tools and whether it makes more sense to use them than CloudGuard. By and large, we just kind of stuck with CloudGuard for the most part. There are definitely more menus that you can navigate over than AWS. Check Point's tools are good and powerful, but given what our deployment looks like, that just complicates things.

Favorable results of its security effectiveness score from third-party lab tests were very important to us. We didn't evaluate too many other options. Just knowing that it wasn't a piece of garbage was a good indicator upfront that it was worth sticking with Check Point down the road. If you are given more things that you have to look at, then there are more possible threats capable of penetrating an environment. So, if you're able to centralize things as much as possible, then you're on the right foot to catch any issues.

With the integrated nature of the Check Point suite, you can have everything under a single pane of glass, which is huge. You can do a lot of the things that you can do with Check Point if you had four or five different other vendors, but being able to do it all in one place is convenient and cost-effective.

In our decision to go with this solution, it was absolutely important that Check Point has been a leader for many years in industry reviews of network firewalls.

We should have done the Auto Scaling stuff upfront instead of going static. The biggest lesson was that the tools in place let you embrace the good parts of the cloud, which is flexibility and cost savings. The thing that we kind of learned is we just treated it upfront like it was another on-prem device, but you miss out on the whole point of having infrastructure as a service if you're not going to leverage it to its fullest capabilities.

Remember that you are doing this in the cloud, so treat it like a cloud device. Don't suddenly try to extend your on-prem network without leveraging the whole capabilities that CloudGuard gives you to scale your network in and out as needed.

CloudGuard's false positive rate is acceptable and low. You have pretty granular control over everything that you are doing. Even if you're running into false positives, you can easily tweak them and work with CloudGuard to eliminate them.

I would rate it a nine (out of 10). It does everything that we wanted it to. It kind of grows with AWS, where new AWS functionality is now enabling new CloudGuard functionality by virtue of a couple of changes that they have been making. They sort of work hand in hand. The only reason that stops it from being a 10 (out of 10) is just the limitations of AWS end up being the limitations CloudGuard as well. You take the good and the bad of the cloud.

We mainly used CloudGuard for IPS and IDS in our AWS environment, and we also used it for additional logging to see what was going in and out of our network in AWS. We have very limited visibility, especially when it comes to logging, and AWS does not support IPS and IDS as of now.

The way they implemented their auto-provisioning, where you just change a port or a security setting on AWS and it applies it automatically to all your firewalls, is good. You don't have to go into both of your firewalls, if you have redundancy like we did. You just need to change it on one of them in AWS, and that change applies to both of the firewalls. That saved us a lot of time. Usually, on physical firewalls, if you have to do that, you're going to have to either do command line, or if you don't want to do command line you have to do console and do multiple changes everywhere, from firewall rules to access rules. With Check Point, all you have to do is one change in the AWS console, and it will apply it within your firewall. Without that we would have had to do that in AWS, then go into the SmartConsole for Check Point.

I'm the only one who does security for both our on-prem and our cloud environments. Having Check Point there, I didn't really have to do much. It gave me peace of mind that it would do its job. I did check on it on a daily basis, just to make sure everything was okay and that there was no unwanted traffic during the day or during the night before. I didn't see anything unusual and if I did see something, it was one of those one-offs because another team was doing testing or something like that.

The IPS, IDS and logging were some of the features that I found useful. Also, the automation using AWS CloudFormation, the way we deployed it to our system, was very simple.

The comprehensiveness of CloudGuard's threat prevention security, looking at the logs, was really good. It would tell me if there was any unwanted traffic on our system, it would keep track of that. We checked it to make sure that everything was okay. It gave me the information that I needed to keep our network safe.

It's also pretty user-friendly. I've used multiple firewalls, both physical and virtual, and to me, Check Point is on top when it comes to ease of use and understanding the firewall installation. It's very very simple. And the way they implemented CloudFormation and the auto provisioning, is hands-down one of the best.

We did not use the AWS Transit Gateway, and that's one of the things that we're currently using. I believe we will be working with Check Point again, in the near future, to implement it, once they start having proper support for a single customer with multiple accounts. When we were using them, we had to install Check Point on each and every single account.

I believe they're working on a solution for that. I know they're utilizing Transit Gateway for it, and that is exactly what we're using right now. I'm excited for them to have that ready, and for us to put it in our system.

In general, cloud infrastructure or a cloud-based environment, is very fast when it comes to technology. Things get developed right away. Check Point just needs to adapt to those changes quicker.

We used Check Point CloudGuard IaaS for over two years. We stopped using it about six to eight months ago. Our environment basically expanded to such a large scale that it wasn't feasible for us to use CloudGuard in our multiple-account production environment.

We are definitely planning on redeploying CloudGuard at some point because we always need IPS and IDS and better logging. AWS only has two or three companies that do IPS/IDS. We definitely need those kinds of protection and Check Point, in my opinion, is one of the best so I still want to put it in place. But their solution doesn't really match our requirements. That's the only reason we moved away from Check Point.

Its stability was really good.

They do implement Auto Scaling and that was one of the requirements that I asked them about. One of their southbound firewalls did not have Auto Scaling at that time, so that's why I requested it.

The scalability is very good; again, very user-friendly. I wouldn't even say "user-friendly" because, as long as you deploy it properly, you can kill an EC2 and it will spin up another one right away, within about a minute and a half. And it will be ready for production right away.

Our production environment never decreased, it only increased. Our presence in AWS quadrupled over the time that we used CloudGuard. I'm managing about 32 accounts that, obviously, need protection. Once they implement that particular solution, we'll be very happy to have them integrated within our environment.

The number of users of CloudGuard, because we had deployed it in our production environment, was as many customers as we had. All traffic went through CloudGuard.

I never dealt with tech support. I dealt more with our account manager. We never had issues with Check Point, so I never had a chance to talk to their support.

We were using native AWS protection.

The initial deployment wasn't too complicated because they had CloudFormation. The only thing that I had issues with was having to integrate that within our company's requirements. Our needs kept changing because we were new to AWS. But that was not an issue with Check Point. And once the requirements within the company had been solidified, we deployed the solution to four or five environments in our AWS and it was fine throughout. We even did their second version of CloudGuard, and again, it was easy.

It's pretty straightforward. It's literally just a matter of selecting the right version of Check Point, your VPC, your management, your password, and that's pretty much it. It's pretty simple.

With the way AWS does things, our deployment took about half a day. And that was mainly because there were dependencies on CloudFormation, where it would wait for a task to finish, and AWS depends on the region that you're in. If you pick a very busy region, then it takes longer than usual. So half a day is giving it padding, in terms of time.

Once it was up and running, it required just me for maintenance.

I was the only one from our organization involved with the deployment.

In the initial installation, the first time, I was working with a Check Point engineer, because we were new to AWS and the Check Point integration with AWS. We came from Azure. We needed somebody just to make sure that we were doing the right thing. But after that, we never needed Check Point support. They would check in on us, just to make sure everything was good.

The engineer was really good. He was there to walk us through and to make sure we understood every piece of the deployment. After that, I put together some documentation based on our needs. From then on, future deployment was fairly simple.

The ROI is in the number of people managing it. Technically, you don't need to manage it. If you have an on-prem, you constantly need to manage the firewall. You need to make sure everything is okay, when it comes to hardware, software, and managing the actual firewall. With CloudGuard on the cloud, we eliminated two of the three. We didn't need to care about the hardware or about the software upgrades. If we did need to upgrade, it was just with respect to CloudFormation. We didn't need to do any firmware. The only thing we needed to do was manage an interface, which is what you're going to do anyway. 

You only need just one person to do it. When it comes to return on investment, you don't need to hire a full team to manage your whole network. If you have a firewall team, with Check Point CloudGuard, you don't need it anymore. It's just a single person because, if a Check Point goes down, it gets spun up right away. You don't need to call anybody or order hardware or anything like that.

Pricing of CloudGuard is pretty fair when you have a single account. It's comparable with other cloud providers. But for our use case, it got really pricey when we had to deploy multiple CloudGuards on multiple accounts in different regions, because you can't have CloudGuard protecting multiple regions. That's the big thing.

Before picking Check Point, I checked Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto. At that moment, when we were doing a PoC, Check Point was ahead of them when it comes to implementation, deployment, and ease of use.

Deployment was the big thing for us because we knew that we were going to be deploying this multiple times. We wanted redundancy, and ease of use and deployment. Check Point nailed those top-three requirements, so it was the clear choice for us. The others didn't have the robust capabilities of Check Point or CloudGuard, to do the things that we wanted. Those included ease of deployment using CloudFormation, scalability using Auto Scaling and the auto-provisioning within CloudGuard.

My advice: Get it. It's a great product. It's a great solution.

In terms of CloudGuard's block rate, malware prevention rate, and exploit resistance rate, we didn't really do much testing when it comes to those types of scenarios. But I've used Check Point as a physical firewall before, and it was great. It detected threats and gave me an alert as soon as it detected them. It was really good.