We use it for security in public cloud implementations, specifically in AWS and Azure.
Director comercial at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Provides the ability to manage the entire solution consistently and easy to deploy
Pros and Cons
- "CloudGuard Network Security provides unified security management across hybrid clouds as well as on-prem. It's very important because when I have unified security, I have better control of the situation. If there's an attack or something like that, we can react faster. It's easier for everyone in the organization to work with the Infinity platform."
- "It needs to cover additional kinds of infrastructure, like containers and serverless options. It's somewhat limited in that area."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
For my customer's organization, it's important because they can work with the same kind of solution. They don't need many different solutions in many different use cases. And then they have better management of the solution in general.
CloudGuard Network Security provides unified security management across hybrid clouds as well as on-prem. It's very important because when I have unified security, I have better control of the situation.
If there's an attack or something like that, we can react faster. It's easier for everyone in the organization to work with the Infinity platform.
What is most valuable?
The integration in the Infinity portal. It's very important for someone to consider the solution if you need to work through a purchase partner. Because they can manage the entire solution consistently with the on-premise Quantum solution and the cloud solution in Azure or AWS without that integration, it's valuable.
What needs improvement?
It needs to cover additional kinds of infrastructure, like containers and serverless options. It's somewhat limited in that area.
Buyer's Guide
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security
June 2025

Learn what your peers think about Check Point CloudGuard Network Security. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it for six months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a stable product. I haven't heard any problems or complaints from my customers.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's quite scalable because we scale by compute units. It's very easy for us to make a new deployment.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used to replace cloud-native solutions from Azure directly or AWS. We don't implement those originally.
It's important for us because we have had a lot of traditional customers. Then, it's a good way to extend this security to the new deployments in public clouds. It's very important for us.
Additionally, the customer is going to find another choice in the market.
How was the initial setup?
The deployment is easy.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price is fair for most of the customers. We don't find the price excessive. It's okay. We can sell it. It's not really hard.
So, the pricing is good.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend using it.
Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. It is very good. Because it's very well integrated with the traditional platform, especially the Infinity portal part. The unified security concept is very sound for that.
However, there is always room for improvement, we always have to extend the capabilities to other use cases.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner

Network security architect at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Helps to secure the Azure environment
Pros and Cons
- "The tool's most valuable features are firewalls and IPS."
- "There is room for improvement, especially concerning the integration with the management center. It would be beneficial if tasks that currently require scripts could be performed directly from the GUI."
What is our primary use case?
I use the product to secure the Azure environment.
What is most valuable?
The tool's most valuable features are firewalls and IPS.
What needs improvement?
There is room for improvement, especially concerning the integration with the management center. It would be beneficial if tasks that currently require scripts could be performed directly from the GUI.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the product for a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The product is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We faced issues with scalability.
How are customer service and support?
The solution's support is good but can be improved.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The product is too expensive.
What other advice do I have?
We have moved our security level from on-prem to the cloud. The security posture is consistent. We can use the same storage system, monitoring system, and objects both on-prem and in the cloud.
I am quite confident with CloudGuard Network Security. The primary reason for choosing the product over other cloud firewall vendors was to maintain the same solution as on-premises. Additionally, it offered a good level of security functionalities.
I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. You should define your requirements before choosing the product.
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Buyer's Guide
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security
June 2025

Learn what your peers think about Check Point CloudGuard Network Security. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Network and Security Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Makes security operations faster and error-free
Pros and Cons
- "The product offers an easy and nice way to manage the gateways, similar to on-prem hardware. It has packet filtering features. Our security operations are faster and less prone to errors. We selected CloudGuard Network Security due to its visibility."
- "The solution needs to improve the interruptions that happen during gateway upgrades."
What is our primary use case?
We use the product for network security and cloud workload protection.
How has it helped my organization?
It's easy to set up in Azure Cloud. The ease of setup helps us save time.
What is most valuable?
It offers an easy and nice way to manage the gateways, similar to on-prem hardware. It has packet filtering features. Our security operations are faster and less prone to errors. We selected CloudGuard Network Security due to its visibility.
CloudGuard Network Security more or less provides us with unified security management across hybrid-clouds as well as on-prem. We manage both environments on the same console. It makes our security operations faster and less prone to error.
What needs improvement?
The solution needs to improve the interruptions that happen during gateway upgrades.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the product for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
There were no major stability issues, although switching gateways could cause some downtime, approximately a minute until the new gateway is fully deployed.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
CloudGuard Network Security's scalability is good.
How are customer service and support?
The tool's support is good. Their responses can get delayed due to time zone differences.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have only used the built-in solutions from Azure.
CloudGuard is easier to understand. CloudGuard is very easy to translate and easy to incorporate features. CloudGuard has better features like packet filters, EPS, threat prevention, and filtering.
We chose CloudGuard because of the visibility. It's much better.
How was the initial setup?
The setup process saves us time, especially in the Azure cloud, as the system continually improves.
What was our ROI?
We have seen ROI through its visibility and through understanding attacks on the workloads.
What other advice do I have?
For us, the solution was easy to understand. The syncing of the CloudGuard Network Security is like that of the gateway on-prem. Translating in a very easy path to bring the features is very easy. I rate the product a nine out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Consultant at ITQS
Easy to manage and implement with simple configuration capabilities
Pros and Cons
- "One of the main characteristics that Check Point CloudGuard Network Security has given us is granularity and visibility."
- "It is somewhat problematic in the area of the cloud."
What is our primary use case?
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security helps resolve potential regulatory and compliance issues when moving to the cloud. The high-visibility rule base's granular approach helps us with potential security leaks and highlights items to focus on for immediate action.
The functionality that we're using it for is the cloud firewall piece.
For this reason, it was necessary to implement this tool in our organization and the results have been very positive, providing the necessary security throughout the infrastructure.
How has it helped my organization?
One of the main characteristics that Check Point CloudGuard Network Security has given us is granularity and visibility. The data that enters our Azure environment integrates in a great way in the cloud and in on-premises. This is important for the alerts and the response to incidents that arise in our platform in the cloud, for the moment, we are very satisfied to have acquired this solution and to have implemented it in the cloud and with other systems on-premise that have given us a lot of security and peace of mind.
What is most valuable?
One of the features that I liked the most and that I feel is very useful is auto-scaling. Our Azure cloud environment is constantly growing and this allows us to expand as well.
Another very accurate feature is CloudGuard's malware prevention and exploit resistance rate and they have given us a lot of security since the database is very large.
It is easy to manage CloudGuard from on-premises and offers the same protection as we can provide to the rest of our environments, which is a great advantage for us.
What needs improvement?
One of the areas that should be improved is the updates of the products. It is somewhat problematic in the area of the cloud. In the case of migration from on-premise to the cloud, it is difficult to replace the licenses. It should be something very transparent and thus save us the time to go to support but in general, the tool is shared very well in security and protection of privacy and if they are lucky they can add more features that help us our security would be great they should always be one step ahead of cyberattacks.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have implemented it two year ago.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security maintains very good stability, and, best of all, maintains excellent compatibility with Azure.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is great. You can make a network scale up or down. This allows you to have good control of bandwidth in the organization or to be able to distribute it in the different departments of the company.
How are customer service and support?
Currently, since the implementation, not much support has been used, therefore, I rate it as excellent.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
The Check Point brand has always been used in our organization.
How was the initial setup?
The configuration was very simple since the tool and the wizard are very interactive and user-friendly. It was not very difficult to do the installation and configuration.
What about the implementation team?
The implementation started with a vendor and the IT team. The engineer that worked with us presented great knowledge of the product.
What was our ROI?
By using a tool of this type, the cost of personnel decreases since the tool performs quite well with the functions that it was designed for.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price and the licenses have been good. They maintain a competitive price with the other companies.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Other options were not evaluated as we like to keep the same brand across solutions.
What other advice do I have?
When doing a cloud deployment, remember you are doing this in the cloud so treat it like a cloud device, as good configuration brings good results.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Delivery Executive at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
The advanced technology helps us automate many manual tasks
Pros and Cons
- "CloudGuard's intelligent tools help us automate many manual security tasks, guaranteeing our customers' environments will be secure."
- "The user experience might suffer if we don't have the time to follow up with our clients and ensure they are using the right options. Clients also want more local support in Portuguese and Spanish during their normal business hours. That's something I hear from my customers and my team, too."
What is our primary use case?
I manage the delivery team of a tech services company. We implement and manage security systems for our clients. CloudGuard is a solution we deploy for larger enterprise clients.
How has it helped my organization?
CloudGuard's intelligent tools help us automate many manual security tasks, guaranteeing our customers' environments will be secure. It saves a lot of time because jobs that might require five or six people can be handled with one or two.
What needs improvement?
Check Point solutions are not easy to use if you don't have experience. We have some Check Point specialists, so it's not difficult for us. The user experience might suffer if we don't have the time to follow up with our clients and ensure they are using the right options. Clients also want more local support in Portuguese and Spanish during their normal business hours. That's something I hear from my customers and my team, too.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used CloudGuard for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
CloudGuard is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
CloudGuard is scalable.
How are customer service and support?
Check Point's support isn't the best, but it's good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We also use solutions by FireMon, AlgoSec, and Akamai. We're constantly comparing products and looking for ways to get more features with less money. Akamai has more solutions, whereas Check Point is more specialized.
How was the initial setup?
Our clients are large and complex, so it is complicated to deploy CloudGuard in their environments.
What about the implementation team?
We had a reseller and use IBM as an integrator. Our experience was positive.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
CloudGuard is reasonable.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Check Point CloudGuard Network Security an eight out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Management services
Security IT at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
CloudGuardModern Security - Excellent MultiCLoud Security tool
Pros and Cons
- "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 cost needs improvement as it is currently quite expensive."
What is our primary use case?
Our need was to be able to provide centralized security governance and control of our "Microsoft Azure" public cloud environment as well as wanting all of the new security checkpoint capabilities that are included in this solution.
With checkpoint Cloud Guard Network security we have been able to provide our infrastructure with many improvements and good practices in network architecture, automatic deployments and alerts to ensure that our infrastructure is without vulnerabilities and with all the best practices.
How has it helped my organization?
Checkpoint CloudGuard Network security is a network enhancement capability of our public cloud, which has given us recommendations, implementations in new subscriptions to avoid many of the most modern vulnerabilities in an infrastructure.
In addition to the fact that this solution brings us closer to having a better security score, which helps us a lot in complying with information regulations based on security.
It also provides a fairly complete and easy to use dashboard environment that has helped us a lot with the administration of the security department.
What is most valuable?
We really liked almost everything about checkpoint CloudGuard network security, for example the ease of managing this service through the checkpoint infinity portal is a great relief, it is accessible from anywhere, MFA can be enabled to provide security in the administrative identity to avoid problems of loss of credentials.
In addition, this tool is complemented by the other checkpoint cloud security features, making it a very robust tool.
Also its reports, its recommendations and its automatic applications for architectures with the best practices provide the help that is required to improve an existing subscription or to start one with all the best practices.
What needs improvement?
Points of improvement for checkpoint cloudguard network security would be partly the cost, which is currently quite expensive.
The documentation to be able to implement the multicloud or link it with Azure is difficult to do or it is not always as indicated, for this you must ask support or the partner for help.
The support for all the checkpoint functions is not the best, since it provides too slow a response to inconveniences, or the support service hours are not the same as in Latin America, which generates latency in the contact between the client and support.
For how long have I used the solution?
This is an excellent Check Point cloud tool, we have been using it since the beginning of 2022. It is a really good tool for cloud environments.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We evaluated using the Microsoft Defender for Cloud tool for a while, however we needed to centralize our security environment and not have portals for different sites.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My recommendation is to try to always look for the best practices of implementation and administration of the product.
In addition to correctly validating the costs before purchasing.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Of course, we always make evaluations of existing tools, we verify Microsoft Defender for Cloud, we also carry out research with Fortinet solutions, however we wanted Checkpoint for all the improvements, virtues and prestige.
What other advice do I have?
This is an expensive but recommended tool, it is very good for cloud environments.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Advisory Information Security Analyst at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
You can have everything under a single pane of glass
Pros and Cons
- "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."
- "The documentation has been rough. Being able to do it yourself can be hit or miss given the constraints of the documentation."
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using it since before it was even called CloudGuard, which has probably been five years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and technical support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
IT Security Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Enables us to deliver connectivity in very short time frames and gives us much better control over sizing of firewalls
Pros and Cons
- "The features of the solution which I have found most valuable are its flexibility and agility. It's a fully scalable solution, from our perspective. We can define scaling groups and, based on the load, it will create new instances. It's truly a product which is oriented toward the cloud mindset, cloud agility, and this is a great feature."
- "The convergence time between cluster members is still not perfect. It's far away from what we get in traditional appliances. If a company wants to move mission-critical applications for an environment to the cloud, it somehow has to accept that it could have downtime of up to 40 seconds, until cluster members switch virtual IP addresses between themselves and start accepting the traffic. That is a little bit too high in my opinion. It's not fully Check Point's fault, because it's a hybrid mechanism with AWS. The blame is 50/50."
What is our primary use case?
We use CloudGuard IaaS for cloud security in AWS, and it serves all kinds of purposes for us. It could be internal segmentation between on-prem or between application VPCs, and it can also help us to provide perimeter security for those parts of the network that require internet access.
How has it helped my organization?
Our company has a very dynamic IT landscape, and the demand to go live is very high. That means we have to deliver connectivity in very short time frames, and we can do that using CloudGuard IaaS. Once we have figured out a working template for connectivity, it becomes our standard, and we can run connectivity for new applications within a day or two, and sometimes it might only take hours. In the past this would take a much longer time. We also now have much better control over the sizing of the firewalls, which gives us a lot of flexibility in our planning.
In addition, we use an existing on-premise appliance, which is a multi-domain security server. The use of CloudGuard's Unified Security Management was an easy part of our integration. We didn't need to make a lot of effort to incorporate the new firewalls. We just needed to apply some existing policies to the new firewall. We didn't have to develop something from scratch. We just used our existing infrastructure and existing policies, and it was the easiest part of the deployment. And the use of the Unified Security Management has definitely freed up security engineers to perform more important tasks.
What is most valuable?
The features of the solution which I have found most valuable are its flexibility and agility. It's a fully scalable solution, from our perspective. We can define scaling groups and, based on the load, it will create new instances. It's truly a product which is oriented toward the cloud mindset, cloud agility, and this is a great feature.
Check Point is a known leader in the area of block rate, so I don't have any complaints about it. It's working as expected. And similarly for malware prevention. When it comes to exploit resistance rate, it's excellent. I haven't seen any Zero-day vulnerabilities found in Check Point products in a very long time, which is not the case with other vendors.
The false positive rate is at an acceptable level. No one would expect a solution to be 100 percent free of false positives. It's obvious that we need to do some manual tuning. But for our specific environment and for our specific traffic, we don't see a lot of false positives.
Overall, the comprehensiveness of the solution's threat prevention security is great. It was changed in our "80." version and I know that Check Point put a lot of effort into threat prevention specifically, as a suite of products. They are trying to make it as simple as it can be. I have been working with Check Point for a long time, and in the past it was much more complicated for an average user, without advanced knowledge. Today it's more and more user-friendly. Check Point itself has started to offer managed services for transformation configuration. So if you don't have enough knowledge to do it yourself, you can rely on Check Point. It's a really great service.
Check Point recently released a feature which recognizes that many companies are going with the MITRE ATT&CK model of incident handling, and it has started to tailor its services to provide incident-related information in that format. It is easier for cyber security defense teams to analyze security incidents, based on the information that Check Point provides. It's great that this vendor looks for feedback from the industry and tries to make the lives of security professionals easier.
I highly rate the security that we are getting from the product, because the security research team is great. We all know that they proactively analyze numerous products available on the IT market, like applications and web platforms, and they find numerous vulnerabilities. And from a reactive point of view, as soon as a vulnerability is discovered, we see a very fast response time from Check Point and the relevant protection is usually released within a day, and sometimes even within a few hours. So the security is great.
What needs improvement?
Clustering has not been perfect from the very beginning. There weren't too many options for redundancy. It was improved in later versions, but that's something which should be available from the very beginning, because the cloud itself offers you a very redundant model with different availability zones, different regions, etc. But the Check Point product was a little bit behind in the past.
The convergence time between cluster members is still not perfect. It's far away from what we get in traditional appliances. If a company wants to move mission-critical applications for an environment to the cloud, it somehow has to accept that it could have downtime of up to 40 seconds, until cluster members switch virtual IP addresses between themselves and start accepting the traffic. That is a little bit too high in my opinion. It's not fully Check Point's fault, because it's a hybrid mechanism with AWS. The blame is 50/50.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using CloudGuard IaaS for close to one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
In terms of the stability, so far everything is good. We have had no problems.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is also great. It's not complicated to configure it and the environment can become really scalable. Everything can be auto-provisioned: instances created, policies pushed, licenses installed. Check Point did a great job in covering all these aspects and reducing manual intervention, which is how it is supposed to be on the cloud.
It is deployed in all AWS regions and we plan to increase the number of security features in use in the future.
How are customer service and technical support?
Check Point's technical support is great. We are a Diamond customer, meaning we have the highest level of support available from them. We always have very competent engineers and the right level of attention. We haven't had an opportunity to test technical support regarding this product, but in general we are happy with technical support we get.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did not have a similar previous solution.
The favorable results of its security effectiveness score from third-party lab tests were not a major part of our consideration because Check Point is a known leader. There were no doubts about security.
As for the solution being a leader for many years in industry reviews of network firewalls, it is important to go with a solution that not only has good specs on paper, but also has a known record of success.
How was the initial setup?
The setup process offered by Check Point is quite straightforward. The challenge is that there is no single blueprint for an organization, and that's why each and every company chooses its own design for the cloud. That means we have to be creative and start adjusting whatever Check Point provided as a setup guide, for our needs.
Setting up a working environment took us approximately 10 days.
Our implementation strategy was quite simple. We first needed to understand the business needs and what the stakeholders wanted us to deliver. Based on that we created a design draft: How to proceed with the least complexity, the best way to provide connectivity, and obviously, to do everything in a secure way. After creating a high-level draft, we started our work. Since the environment was not really in production yet, it was a long path of trial and error. But at the end of the day, all aspects were accounted for, lessons were learned, and we adjusted our initial design and prepared operational documentation for our operational team.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Licensing is easy since this is a virtual instance which does not require RMA.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
The cloud security provided by public cloud providers is great because it's cloud-native. Sometimes it comes without an additional cost or as part of a basic license, but it's definitely not enough for an enterprise environment. Everything comes back to operational complexity. I could incorporate a new, simple tool from a public provider, but on my side it would mean I would need to up-skill team members and manage an additional layer of security, and it could be hard for troubleshooting. To integrate these tools into the peripheral systems, like sending logs, and analyzing these logs, and maintaining additional rule sets from additional dashboards, would require additional efforts.
So cloud-native security has its own disadvantages. Many companies try to stick with the simplicity whenever they define the operational flows, but I prefer choosing Check Point everywhere in a hybrid environment to make my life easier from all perspectives.
What other advice do I have?
The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is that network security is moving away from traditional deployments and companies have to adapt themselves to stay competitive.
We are fully managing the service. As soon as a new version is released on the Check Point site, they make sure to release it for CloudGuard as well. But so far, we have stayed with our original version. We haven't done any upgrades.
The integration process between CloudGuard and AWS Transit Gateway is not straightforward, because we're not talking about traditional networking. There are a lot of different aspects that we are still not used to keeping in mind. For example, routing is completely reworked in AWS. It's just a matter of time to get used to it. Once you get used to it, everything becomes relatively easy.
In terms of our workflow when using the integration between CloudGuard and AWS Transit Gateway, we needed to review our operational documentation and prepare additional guides for our operations team on how to do it. We needed to up-skill our team members, and we needed to utilize new technologies or new features, like BGP over VPN, to make communication secure in the cloud.
The solution provides security for numerous corporate applications and is under the responsibility of the operations team which consists of about 15 people. For deployment and maintenance of the solution we have one security operations engineer, one network operations engineer, one AWS operations engineer, and one SDWAN engineer.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.

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Updated: June 2025
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