Check Point CloudGuard Network Security Reviews

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.

We integrate this solution, and we also provide the maintenance of the device. We are using this solution for those sites that are kind of medium in size and require a more complex solution but don't have too much space for big equipment.

It is useful for us for checking services, instead of protocols, because we have some services that are very smart and can change ports. It is also useful for verifying the logs. SmartLog is very practical, and it is easy to identify stuff and make corrections.

The Capsule solution and application filters are the most valuable. 

It is pretty straightforward to implement, and it also has good stability and scalability. Their technical support is also really good.

This application can be more integrated with web application firewalls. Better integrations would provide more granularity, which would be helpful for focusing on the application itself and preventing attacks.

It would be good to include the cross-domain search. If you have multiple firewalls that are managed on the same platform and you want to check who is using some particular objects or where a specific ID is being used, it should provide an option for this kind of search instead of having to check one by one on each firewall.

I have been using this solution for more or less ten years.

It is pretty stable.

With the virtual assistant, its scalability is very good.

Their technical support is really good.

The initial setup is pretty easy. Where it is not that simple is the integration of different blades and the customization of rules, which are really dependent on the policies of a company. When we are dealing with a small company, it is easy, but when we are dealing with global corporations that have previously-defined policies and the integration with the profiles, it is a little bit more tricky and complex.

The deployment takes a couple of days, but when the deployment is more complex and requires assessments, it could take one or two weeks.

We are an integrator. The number of people that are required for the deployment and maintenance of this product depends on the organization. The deployment could be done by one or two people, but for the maintenance of the device, big companies require more people because they are establishing new connections with third parties and so on, which means that it requires many changes.

It is not expensive, but it is a little bit above the middle range. There are other solutions that are a little more expensive than this, but they also have some interesting features.

Our clients also evaluate Palo Alto and Cisco. Palo Alto, Check Point, and Cisco are the top solutions at the moment. In terms of performance, all three are pretty much the same, but it is much easier to check logs on the firewall in Check Point than Cisco or Palo Alto. Check Point is also quicker and more intuitive. Its view is also better than others.

I would recommend this solution. It is pretty straightforward to implement. It is easy, and it doesn't require too much time to make a clean implementation. I am not really sure about using it in a really small company. It depends on the budget.

I would rate Check Point Virtual Systems a nine out of ten.

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.

We have an AWS environment with servers and resources. We also have a Cloud environment and CloudGuard is our solution to protect the internet access to and from the database environment. For example, servers on the AWS that need to do upgrades go to the internet and cross the CloudGuard solution. People that need to connect to the AWS environment, to a server are protected by CloudGuard. The environment is protected by CloudGuard. It's our perimeter firewall on the AWS environment.

We were already used to Check Point products and we needed to protect the AWS environment. It was very straightforward. We could use the same policies that we use on-prem. We were already used to the logs, for the kinds of things Check Point shows in terms of what is crossing to the internet. We didn't need to get used to a new kind of log that we were not used to. It saved us a lot of time. We were able to seamlessly extend our on-premise protection to Cloud and didn't require any effort.

Two years ago, we didn't know what the best way was to protect the environment but we found out that we could use the same kind of protection that we use on-prem. It helped our security team to be confident that the cloud environment is protected. 

The use of unified security management has freed up security engineers to perform more important tasks. We saved a lot of time, especially managing the threat prevention profiles because when we want to do some kind of exception or enable a new kind of protection, we can enable it on all our firewalls, not only the AWS but also on the on-prem firewalls at the same time using the same profile. That helps us a lot and saves us a lot of time because we don't need to go to the AWS protection to do stuff and then to the other premise. It saves at least four hours a week.

Compared to the security provided by AWS, CloudGuard is very easy to understand why something is being blocked. We can see it on the SmartConsole for Check Point, which is one of our favorite products for security. It's much easier to understand what and why something is happening. 

The most valuable feature is that we can use the same manager server that we use on our own Check Point firewalls. We integrated CloudGuard on that manager and we can use the same kind of protections that we use on the on-prem firewalls, like the IPS and antivirus policy. We can have the same kind of protection on the Cloud environment that we have on-premise.

• The block rate is good. It's what we used on-prem. We feel protected by the Check Point threat prevention that we used for many years. We are confident that it blocks everything that needs to be blocked.
• Malware prevention is also a good feature. It's the same kind of malware prevention we use on-prem and we never had any issues. We have used on-prem prevention for many years. 
• Exploit resistance rate - we never had any problems with it. We never had any security issues due to exploits on our diverse infrastructure.

In terms of the comprehensiveness of its threat prevention security, it was very easy for us to start working with because it's the same. Check Point has a very wide group of protections, dozens of protections. It's very good in terms of protection.

CloudGuard is very good in terms of ease of use, especially because it's very easy to understand the blocks and why something was blocked. You can see in a log why something was blocked, if it was identified as some kind of malware or suspicious activity. You can immediately see on the log the rule or the threat prevention policy that was blocking it if you want to do some kind of exception, or if you want to verify why. And it's very well documented with the description of the threat and why it should be blocked.

CloudGuard functions just like any other firewall. It functions very well. The only thing that could maybe be improved would be to integrate some tools that are not integrated with the SmartConsole, like the SmartView Monitor that we need to open on a different application to access.

I have been using CloudGuard IaaS for two years. 

It was always very stable, so we deployed it and now we only manage the policy, the application control, and the IPS. In terms of stability, it's very stable.

Its scalability is one of the best features because of the auto-scaling groups.

There are three users in the company who are all network security engineers.

It's has a 100% adoption rate. Our Cloud environment goes to the internet through the CloudGuard solution.

Support is good. We never had anything that they couldn't help us with.

We did the deployment with vendor support. It's not straightforward, especially because the solution was fairly new when we started to deploy. There wasn't a lot of the commutation that there is now. We had help through remote sessions and the vendor. We managed to do it, but it's not very straightforward.

We had to get used to the concept. We use the auto-scaling groups, which is when there is low internet access needs, we only have one gateway. And when a lot of people access the internet, the product automatically generates more visual firewalls. This was a different concept than what we have on-premises, of course, because this is not what's on-prem. The concept of auto-scaling groups was something we needed to get used to.

It saves us money because if for example, we have three firewalls running but at night, no one is working, the internet access is very low. The solution automatically reduces the number of instances to one, which is the minimum. Then, if someone is doing a lot of things that need internet access, it automatically spins more instances. This saves us money.

The deployment took one week.

The implementation strategy was to first do a proof of concept, only for our Dev VPC. Only the Dev VPC was using the internet through this solution, and then when we were confident that it worked as we thought it should work. We deployed it in all our accounts, production, and corporate.

We are aware of the overall perspective of the Check Point security products and the rates. We were already aware that it meets the ones that we use on-prem. So we are always aware of those results. 

The fact that CloudGuard has been a leader for many years in industry reviews of network firewalls was also important, but the most important thing was that we can also use it on-prem and we are satisfied with it. 

The consultants were very helpful. 

Pricing for these kinds of products is always expensive but I would say that it's in line with the competition.

We didn't evaluate other solutions because it was a good fit for us and not worth evaluating other solutions.

If you are already a Check Point customer, this is the perfect solution. If you are not used to Check Point products, you should also analyze other solutions and compare them before you buy.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that with this product, you can secure the Cloud environment the same way that you secure the on-prem, which helps a lot with people that are new to the Cloud security environment.

I would rate Check Point CloudGuard IaaS a ten out of ten. 

The main usage of the Check Point CloudGuard IaaS within our company is for the protection of our cloud assets. It is deployed on Google Cloud Platform with the help of the Firewall, Application Control, and Intrusion Prevention System software blades. 

In addition, we rely heavily on the GeoIP module to restrict undesired countries from accessing our services, as for now, you can't achieve it with the GCP firewall.

There are about 30 Google Cloud projects of different sizes ranging from 10 to 250 virtual machines, and they are used for development, staging, production, etc. For every project, there is one dedicated scalable instance group of the Check Point CloudGuard IaaS gateways.

While using the Check Point CloudGuard IaaS gateways in the cloud environment, we had almost the same experience as with other Check Point firewall solutions.

The components of the infrastructure are integrated with each other quite well. All the common Check Point Next Generation Firewall blades are supported including Firewall, IPS, Antivirus, VPN, etc. There is not a big difference with the usual on-premises gateway from this perspective. This provided us a smooth experience while moving our load from on-premises data centers to the Google Cloud environments, and increased the adoption and the speed of the migration process.

I find it really useful that CloudGuard supports all the main players on the Public Clouds market including AWS, GCP, and Azure, as well as some exotic ones like Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and IBM Cloud. I would say there is about a 95% probability that the platform you are using is supported, and I don't know any other solution for now that can provide the same number. Moreover, it integrates with most of the public cloud management solutions, so you could automate modification of the security policies based on some triggers or changes in your cloud infrastructure.

I also like that different licensing models are supported. For testing/evaluation/PoC projects, you could go with the Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) license without wasting a lot of money in case the solution somehow doesn't suit you. On the other hand, for production, you could use the Bring-your-own-license (BYOL) way, applying the license bought earlier.

As with other solutions of this kind, you still have to manage basic cloud firewalls and routes for VPC outside of CloudGuard IaaS. There's no 100% integration.

I hope that Check Point continues to improve its technical documentation regarding the Check Point CloudGuard IaaS gateway and management system. For example, the questions on how to scale the instances in the relevant cloud should be covered, and all the High Availability options and switchover scenarios. Without that, users have to open numerous consulting cases to the support team to get it right.

We have been using Check Point CloudGuard IaaS for less than a year.

The Check Point CloudGuard IaaS is stable product, and in fact it runs the same code as the hardware Check Point NGFWs, so no issues were encountered there.

The Check Point CloudGuard IaaS scales well for the Google Cloud Platform with the help of the Instance Groups feature.

We have had several support cases opened. Some of the issues were resolved by installing the latest recommended JumoHotfix, whereas some required additional configuration on the OS kernel level.

The longest issue took about one month to be resolved, which we consider too long.

We didn't use such solutions before and had to rely on the built-in firewall rules of the Google Cloud Platform infrastructure.

The setup was straightforward, and the configuration was easy and understandable.

Our deployment was completed by our in-house team. We have a Check Point Certified engineer working in the engineering team.

There is flexibility in the different licensing models that are offered.

For testing/evaluation/PoC projects, you could go with the Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) license without wasting a lot of money in case the solution somehow doesn't suit you. On the other hand, for production, you could use the Bring-your-own-license (BYOL) way, applying the license bought earlier.

This is a flexible approach and we like that.

No, since we decided to have a unified firewalling solution across all the infrastructure, and we already had the Check Point firewalls in the on-premises data centers.

You should fully understand the way CloudGuard would be integrated into your cloud from a networking perspective, and it differs from platform to platform. For example, for Google Cloud, the instances of Cloud Guard must have interfaces in several VPCs as a requirement. Think about the subnetting and routing for your project, then implement a PoC with your networking staff.

It secures our assets in the cloud while providing access to applications in our vendor hosted data centers via IPSEC tunnels. We also use it for endpoint vpn for all our users. We have it deployed in our cloud and it forms the gateway for all external connectivity and access to the assets in the cloud. We also have a backup site to site connection with our on premise data center so in case the primary connection to the cloud fails we can quick fail over to this backup connection and business can continue as normal .

We have it deployed in our cloud and it forms the gateway for all external connectivity and access to the assets in the cloud. CloudGuard IaaS has given us the complete redundancy that we have been designing and planning for over 2 years. CloudGuard provided the Gas South remote users with an alternate and secure connection into our completed IT infrastructure so that our remote users can log into CloudGuard end-user VPN over a secure and encrypted method and work as normal. This has come in very handy during this COVID-19 times.

We have found the overall functionality of the product to be exactly similar to the physical product. The one good advantage is that it is cloud-based and can be deployed either as a part of a scale set or one can shut down the virtual machine and adjust the physical parameters of the virtual machine easily and bring it right back up. Also if deployed as a cluster this can be done without any downtime at all since you can take down one virtual machine at a time to upgrade. Overall a very well designed product

I think they have pretty much mastered what can be done. There are some nuances like when you fail over from one cluster member to the other, the external IP address takes about two minutes to fail over. During this time there is an outage of service. On digging into this further I found that this is more on the cloud fabric and provider side than the actual Checkpoint CloudGuard side. The Cloud provider is taking that long to actually detach the Virtual IP Address (VIP) from one machine and fail it over to the other

Almost two years.

We have always been a Check Point customer.

If you are a Microsoft Azure customer the setup is very simple. There is already a great template there ready for deployment. Read the deployment guide fully before attempting it. Licensing is built into the deployment but you will get billed separately as a market place deployment and does not get charged to your subscription. This is a bit frustrating but they are working on fixing this

We did look at bring in other alternate vendors before settling on CloudGuard. We did a POC of Fortinet.

Most security solutions traditionally have been protecting physical assets within an environment, or reliance on an inline hardware appliance. CloudGuard takes the security controls that were previously packaged with physical appliances in mind and extends them to the virtual infrastructure.

It's an add-on capability to an existing virtual infrastructure, such as an AWS, Azure, or even on-premise solutions. It adds a security layer on top of your existing infrastructure with zero latency.

We're hosting it ourselves on our hypervisors, as well as starting to do so in some of our private cloud instances. It's solely managed by us with a pair of consolidated management servers.

This virtual platform is unique in the way that it augments our existing physical controls through a centralized management system. When many organizations, like ours, went from physical servers to virtual servers and desktops, there was a blind spot there. We no longer had visibility into what was happening within our environment, and that extended to the cloud as well where it's difficult, if not impossible, to introduce hardware — firewalls and other security protection. This solution takes what is still required around intrusion detection/prevention, anti-malware, and other threat protection capabilities and extends it to all of our virtual assets, regardless of where they live, in a private or public cloud.

CloudGuard has closed a significant gap that we had in our environment. We were searching for the right solution for many years, to gain visibility into, and protection of, all of our virtual asset servers, desktops, and workloads. There have been other products throughout the years that provided a similar type of technology, but had we purchased and move forward with those, we would have seen a degradation of performance within our environment, as traffic would have to be what's considered "hair-pinning" and going in and out of the virtual environment to another either virtual or physical appliance. We intentionally delayed our purchase of this kind of solution because we were not satisfied with that architecture. We weren't willing sacrifice performance degradation on our network. That's really the big benefit of the CloudGuard, it is able to live within the same virtual instances as the other virtual assets and workloads.

What's most valuable to me is that it's a contiguous solution that aligns well with the components that we've relied on and trusted from a traditional hardware, firewall, and unified threat management system. My engineers and analysts don't have to learn another platform. We have already entrusted our security controls to Check Point for perimeter and physical security, and now we can do so at the virtual layer as well, which is key to us. It really augments their current stack of capabilities. It all aligns well under their umbrella of their Infinity architecture, which we have adopted.

It's meeting our needs at this time. If I could make it better, it would be by making it more standalone. That would be beneficial to us. I say that because our current platform for virtualization is VMware. The issue isn't any fault of Check Point, it's more how the virtualization platform partners allow for that partnership and integration. There has to be close ties and partnerships between the vendors to ensure interoperability and sup-portability. There is only so far that Check Point, or any security vendor technology can go without the partnership and enablement of the virtualization platform vendor as it relies on "Service Insertion" to maintain optimal performance. 

We are frequently in contact with Check Point's Diamond Support, Product Development Managers as well as their sales team, as we look to keep apprised of where the product ius and should be going. Most of our requests have been around our physical assets, the physical UTM devices — Check Point Maestro, as an example — as well as their endpoint systems. There has not been anything at this time where we've said, "We wish CloudGuard did X differently." CloudGuard, in my opinion, having recently talked with them, is continously improving and is incorporating some of their recently acquired capabilities, such as Dome9 cloud compliance. Those are areas I have been evaluating and looking to add to my environment. My preference would be that it be included in my CloudGuard subscription licensing, and not an add-on; But that's the only thing that I could say that would be beneficial to us as an enhancement to the system.

We've been using Check Point CloudGuard IaaS for about three years.

The stability has been great. There has been no concern at all. We have not had any known downtime or issues to speak of.

Scalability was well thought out and designed. I've spoken about this at several Check Point CPX events. Throughout the instances that we have, if a single Check Point CloudGuard instance is overloaded due to event load, it will intelligently redirect that workload to another service on a different host, so that it's not delaying the interrogation of the traffic.

It's being used throughout our environment. We will increase usage only when we augment our cloud offerings.

Users, in this case, are the IT security and networking folks that support it and rely on these controls being effective. They analyze the output of the event interrogation. Right now, I have three resources supporting CloudGuard. I don't have dedicated staff for maintaining the solution. They're shared resources who work on other network and security devices. From an operational standpoint, it's a fraction of an FTE that is required.

Check Point's technical support for this solution, overall, is very good. Check Point has architected this solution well enough that it has similar, if not the same, code base as the physical devices. It doesn't appear to be a big lift and can leverage the same support engineers for CloudGuard as we would have for our physical devices.

We never found a solution we were satisfied with, and which would not affect our overall operational performance.

I was not personally involved in the initial deployment, as I'm the CISO of the organization, but I was closely engaged with my engineers. The CloudGuard portion of our installation and setup was extremely simple, in comparison to the integrated component on the virtualization side of things. Check Point made it extremely easy to deploy and configure, especially because it's done from our consolidated management devices that we're already familiar from our physical unified threat management devices.

The delays in deployment were mostly due to the virtualization side of things. If it was just CloudGuard alone, we probably could have had that done in about six to eight weeks. But there were several starts and stops due to the accompanying VMware component, which has really extended, I hate to say it, over 12 months.

In terms of our implementation strategy, the intent is that every host in our environment that serves up virtual assets and workloads would have an instance of CloudGuard installed on it. And then all respective HTTP/HTTPS traffic would be routed through Check Point for visibility and interrogation, so that if any of its threat controls determined that an asset was rogue or infected due to some malicious insider or outsider, it would automatically quarantine that device. We have tested that and it worked successfully.

We installed it with the help of Check Point-badged engineers. To be honest, we had to ask for a new lead engineer. And once that occurred, the project implementation went very smoothly.

ROI is a very difficult metric in the security space. We've been fortunate that we haven't had an event in which we would say that because of CloudGuard our MTTD and MTTR was low and we quickly identified and stopped a malicious adversary.

However, we are now more confident in our security controls and visibility. CloudGuard plays a significant role in our SOAR (Security Orchestration Automation and Response) initiative. We can now automate the isolation of an infected machine with the help of CloudGuard.  This in itself is the best ROI as it doesn't require manual intervention to detect and respond.

The pricing and licensing of this is much more digestible than that of its hardware equivalent. I've found, in times past, especially on the hardware side of things, that the licensing support and maintenance could be very daunting to understand. If that has scared folks away in the past, CloudGuard is much simpler. 

Licensing is simply by the number of hosts that you are looking to protect within your environment. It makes it much easier to ensure that you are covering your environment.

If you are not already a Check Point customer for the UTM and the SmartEvent, there likely would be an additional cost, beyond the standard CloudGuard licensing, if you wanted the reporting. It's a unique instance where we already had an established infrastructure of Check Point devices on our network, and then we added CloudGuard to it. Had we started with CloudGuard, and only had virtual assets to protect, it is possible that there would be additional cost. I would urge folks to look into what it would cost to add the reporting capabilities and log event management.

We looked at offerings from Cisco (ACI), Illumio and Gigamon. This was about three-and-a-half years ago.

The main differentiator, and the reason we selected Check Point, is how it integrated with our virtualization platforms. It lived there natively. It had the least amount of overhead to interrogate the traffic within our environment. It also aligned well with our consolidated reporting and management solutions that we have come to rely on from our Check Point physical UTM devices.

Intently know and understand the integration points within your environment. It is a great security solution, but understand how integrated it is with, and what level of partnership there is between, Check Point and the virtualization platform that you're looking to add it on top of.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that the Check Point CloudGuard features, although good, are only as good as the accompanying virtual platform and its level of integration. I have to be honest: Overall, this is the ideal solution for us and our organization, but it is slightly more complex. There are newer competitive products that take a different stance, that are agent-based. We did not want — and this is another key distinction — a solution that wasn't agent-based in which we had to deploy a piece of software on each and every virtual endpoint. Having this done at the hypervisor level definitely was the right strategy for us. However, the lesson learned, with this type of solution, is that it is very important to understand the nuances of your virtualization platform and what is required on that side to enable the Check Point CloudGuard.

You're relying heavily on the partnership and the capabilities of that virtualization platform. Going in, understand the degree of that partnership and the respective road maps of each, because the CloudGuard solution is only as good as the capabilities it has with the virtualization platform. That's especially true for large enterprises that want to constantly move workloads around and have their rule set follow in an event where they're having to ensure that systems are always alive and always protected.

We use this solution as our perimeter firewall. 

The most valuable feature for us is the cluster support. We have been using this for a long time, so it is not a feature from the latest version.

We would like to be able to scale out such that we can increase performance within a cluster with more active nodes.

Our biggest complaint concerns the high resource usage for IDS/IPS, as we cannot turn on all of the features even with a recent hardware upgrade.

A great enhancement for this solution would be an active-active or multi-active scalability.

As we need to fulfill higher bandwidth demands due to increased cloud usage and research-driven data exchange, we might need to look for other vendors with more competitive pricing.

This is a stable solution.

Six months ago, we updated our version to the most recent one.

The scalability of this solution is limited, which is why we have started looking for alternatives. Currently, we have about twenty-thousand users.

Technical support for this solution is good. They have a quick response and the solution was available within a short period.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

This initial setup of this solution is complex.

The preparation for deployment took two days, and the deployment itself took about two hours.

We have three staff who are responsible for maintaining the firewall, although there are more tasks that they handle, in addition to it.

We enlisted the help of a service provider to assist us with the implementation. 

The price of this solution could be improved. We pay approximately ‎€150,000 ($166,000 USD) per year. We receive four days of support every year from our service provider before we have to contact Check Point. 

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution, although we are currently considering alternative solutions from Forcepoint and Fortinet.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to start by identifying high-bandwidth use cases. If you have any, and you have a high-security requirement, then I suggest considering other options.

This is a secure and reliable solution for us, although we are a bit disappointed with the limited scalability and resource consumption.  

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.