Check Point CloudGuard Network Security Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have been using CloudGuard IaaS for close to one year.

In terms of the stability, so far everything is good. We have had no problems. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Licensing is easy since this is a virtual instance which does not require RMA.

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.

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.

We use it as an edge firewall to our entire cloud environment. It protects our connections to all of our sites, to our cloud data center. And it's the internet edge, the protection mechanism between the internet and our network.

The biggest example of how it has helped our company function is the single pane of glass. The way that we implemented it is that we monitor a lot of devices in our environment through this one place now, instead of it all being distributed. We don't have to log in to different systems, correlate the data, and say, "Okay, this was related to that," etc. It's one pane of glass, so the time to resolution and the time to find what we're looking for have become a lot shorter because we're able to just put all the data into this one pane of glass. We can look at it a lot quicker and decipher what's going on a lot quicker that way.

In some cases it has saved us hours in time to remediation, in some cases a day. When dealing with a single problem that may have taken an entire work day or so to really hunt down and know what's going on, this has brought it down to finding it within an hour or 45 minutes or so.

We use its Unified Security Management to manage the solution for on-prem appliances. We combine our cloud and on-prem environments. We have multiple devices at different sites that we manage through the single Management Server, which elevates us, again, to another single pane of glass, instead of all these firewalls all over the place and having to log in to each one of them. We look at all the data and correlate it on the one system that we use to unify our physical sites and our cloud environment.

Using CloudGuard IaaS has also definitely freed up security engineers to perform more important tasks. We don't have a large team that works on these, but it has freed up the equivalent of one or two roles, overall. It saves everyone a couple of hours a week, and those couple of hours mean we can take on new projects as a team.

In addition, compared to native cloud security protection, Check Point is far more advanced. There are far more options available than in a lot of the cloud-native stuff. The cloud-native solutions have similar tools that are more "pay and spray." You buy it, you implement it, and you have a few ways to configure it for your environment. But the flexibility in Check Point is due to the fact that they've always empowered the management. You can tune whatever you want and however you need it. With other cloud providers, the approach with their tools is, "Here's how we do it in the cloud and you need to adopt it our way," which is fine. It makes it simpler to manage, but you have less flexibility to customize it to your needs.

It's really the whole suite that is valuable. But within that, the Identity Awareness is good because you can build your policies around each user. You can say what each user, or group of users, like HR, for example, can do. 

Also, the visibility, the one-pane-of-glass which allows me to see all of my edge protection through one window and one log, is great. Monitoring everything through that one pane of glass is extremely valuable.

Their IPS stuff is just fine. It updates the signatures regularly and it does a lot of that stuff automatically in the background so I don't need to worry much about that. It does its blocking and organizes things for me, as an administrator, to look at and to pick and choose what preventions I need to have enabled. That is user-friendly and it's very descriptive. I know what I'm looking at and what I need to enable. It's really useful and is one of the reasons I continue to use the product.

In addition, the reporting gives you a lot of flexibility in building your own custom stuff.

The biggest room for improvement is that, for a long time now, they've moved everything over to R80 but they still maintain some of the stuff in the old dashboard. They need to "buy in" and move everything to the modern dashboard so that you don't have to go to one place and to another place, at times, to configure the environment. It's time they just finish what they started and put everything in the new, modern dashboard. I thought they would have done that by now. It has been years. It's always a little disappointing when you get a new version and you see that it's still using the old dashboard for some of the configuration and some of the stuff that you look at.

They just need to make sure they get all their tools into this one place. It would make it a lot easier for the managers.

We just did an implementation of Check Point CloudGuard IaaS this year, so we've used it for less than a year. But the CloudGuard IaaS solution is the same software we've been running in our environment for years, just in the cloud. So our familiarity with it, and how it works is expert level.

I've had no problems with its stability or reliability. It's been up and running since then. We've done some patching of the system. And we've built it to be highly available so that we could shut certain ones down and bring other ones up. As we've done that, we've had no outages, nothing even close; nothing that would be of impact, since the implementation.

Scalability is amazing when you're in the cloud. It's no problem. Once you settle on a configuration like we have, and once you've put it together and decided that this is your de facto template, all you have to do is click a couple of buttons to deploy another one. And that scales upwards. It's very simple.

It's used pretty extensively in our environment because we are trying to get the single pane of glass for traffic going through our network in multiple directions from a bunch of different networks. It's playing a more important role than the individual Check Point firewalls we used. We don't, at this time, need anything more with CloudGuard. We may, in the future, need another data center, so that's a consideration. I'm looking at other Check Point products that secure other components, in different ways. Our relationship with Check Point is still growing.

Their technical support is usually spot-on. They've got some really good guys there. No matter what, sometimes you're going to get someone who is brand-new and who might not know as much, but they're okay at escalating, when that happens. But most of the time you've got someone who is highly trained and really knows what they're talking about, or they'll get you to someone who does. You generally find a resolution pretty quickly, or you can really take a deep technical dive with them.

For this type of functionality we did not have a previous solution. We're building a new cloud data center, and this was our first cloud protection. But it's basically a firewall on the edge of a network.

We've had different firewalls on the edge of our other networks prior to this and we've consolidated those into the Check Point solution so that we've got just one vendor to deal with. We had some Juniper firewalls and some Cisco ASAs. We also had some WatchGuards and one old Palo Alto in there. It was a variety of solutions, depending on which network we were in. There was something of a long journey that took us two years or so to get to where we are now. We're almost there using one solution, one pane of glass, and one configuration.

We knew we needed to change because things were taking too much time. We weren't being efficient. We weren't able to get stuff done. Requests that were coming in were not being fulfilled properly. They were being half-done. There were too many different technologies that served the exact same purpose. It was incredibly inefficient because everybody needed to be trained up on every single one of them, including everything that they needed to do in their roles. Unless we wanted to hire four or five times the amount of staff so that we could have people specializing in just firewalls, we needed to change. To keep the same lean model, where we have people doing a variety of roles, we needed not to have to study 10 different things that serve the exact same purpose. So we decided that we were going to consolidate to one vendor.

In our decision to go with Check Point CloudGuard the favorable results of its security effectiveness score from third-party lab tests were a factor, but not really important. Our biggest deciding factor was what we had in the environment already; what we were most comfortable with. What was important was a solution that was the most feature-rich, and that could actually accomplish our goals the best among the vendors we already had. We didn't want to go with an entirely new vendor either, to leverage some of the knowledge we already had about them. We picked what we thought would serve us the best.

The fact that Check Point has been a leader, for many years, in industry reviews of network firewalls definitely affected our decision to go with it. They had to be a leader because with this — because of how important it is in our network — I was not ready to take a risk on a young, enterprising company that may be very creative in what it's doing but that will stumble more, along the way, than a company that is well-established.

The setup seemed straightforward. We had a roadmap; we had it all planned out. But there were parts of the implementation that were "aha" moments. There were things that I found during the implementation that I told their engineers about and they would say, "Oh, you're right, that totally doesn't work," even though it was documented that it did. They would say, "We'll go back to our developers and they'll probably fix that in another release." 

During the implementation, we built and destroyed the environment about 10 times because we got to a point where we said, "Alright, maybe this is a problem with something we did earlier. Let's just start over and make sure that we follow every step and we don't make a mistake, to verify that this will work." A couple of different things were documented that you could do but it turned out that, no, you just couldn't quite do them yet.

We started talking about the deployment at the beginning of May and we were done by the end of June. It took about two months.

We were building a new data center in the cloud. We traditionally had stuff onsite but we had decided we were going to uplift everything and move it into the cloud. This was us building our network and the edge of the network in the cloud in preparation for moving everything up there. This was the first step in a long, ongoing process.

In terms of maintaining it, there is only ever one person on it, unless there's a major event going on. We're a team and all of us use the data coming out of it at various times. No one is ever just sitting there monitoring the thing all the time. We have other tools that help with that and send us notifications if something's weird that we need to look at a little further. It's the the team who are logging in regularly, every week, and pulling pieces of data out of it for either an investigation we're doing or a report we're doing. It's used frequently.

No one else is using it directly. There are other teams that, for certain reporting, may request some data from us to use for analysis. But no one else is actually logging in and using the tool.

We worked with the Check Point cloud implementation team. There were two of us from my team involved and three Check Point cloud architects who helped us through most of the process.

We've seen ROI in time saved in threat hunting and in having a unified policy across our organization. We actually have this one policy that we can look at to determine if something is going to be accurately filtered. It has been very valuable.

It has been very expensive but my approach is that, while we're spending a bit more money, we're getting everything that we actually need. We should be happy with that. Obviously everybody would love to spend less, but that's just not the reality.

The pricing is pretty high, not just for your capital, for what you have to pay upfront, but for what you pay for your annual software renewals as well, compared to a lot of other vendors. Check Point is near the top, as far as how much it's going to cost you.

Years ago they used to piecemeal and you could pick whatever you wanted. But now they have two basic options. You can go with this level or the higher level and that's it. It makes it simple.

We looked into the same vendors that we already had onsite. We looked at Cisco, WatchGuard, and Palo Alto, in addition to Check Point.

Some of them were actually quicker, in terms of mouse clicks, but they were less intuitive. With some of them you could just write a couple commands on a command-line and it would spit out the data for you, instead of having to click around with a bunch of mouse clicks. But that would have required some of the staff being comfortable with scripting, coding, and command-line stuff.

All of these solutions have their own unique perspectives. Most of them are pretty much market leaders. They're all very effective in their own ways, especially in threat protection. They all have very extensive databases on their protections and know what they're doing, and that's why they're all market leaders.

Sometimes you've got to pay for what you actually want. We realized that it's an expensive solution, there's no denying that. But we're happy with what we have gotten out of it. Sometimes you just have to fork over the cash out of your budget and work with it. Work hard with it, because you can't just spend money and expect it to work. But with the time that you put into it, you can get something really good out of it for your company.

Really do your analysis, which is something anybody should really know if they're going to spend a lot of money like this. They offer up trials. Try it out and see if it actually works for you.

One of the biggest reasons it was successful for us was because we already used it in our environment and we used it pretty extensively. We had a variety of different systems in there, but we used the Check Point more. So we were more familiar with it coming into it and that's why we leaned more towards it. We figured, it will be expensive but it will probably have the lowest learning curve for us to get where we want to be.

Another company may already use, say, Palo Alto extensively and be very familiar with it. If their decision is that they want their team to be really well versed in what's going on, rather than have to break it all down and study all over again and retrain everybody, maybe their choice will be to stick with their Palo Alto solution rather than flipping over to Check Point. 

If you're going to change vendors entirely, you're going to have a steep learning curve and that's going to mean it will take time, where you might not be able to fulfill a request, because you have to learn how to do it.

I haven't really measured rates like the block rate or malware prevention rate yet. The CloudGuard stuff is the same software running under there that I have run for years. It's just in a cloud environment and it's been extremely effective. It doesn't really paint a picture of how much actually gets through, so I don't know the rates, but I do know that I don't have a lot of problems with things getting through that I didn't know about or didn't want to get through.

I don't think there are really any false positives with this solution. Sometimes an investigation that leads me down a path and I follow it so far that I can't quite figure it out, but I attribute that to not having enough visibility into other areas of the environment to actually see what's going on, so I can't paint the whole picture and can't then solve the problem. But I don't have a problem with false positives leading me down a path towards something that just had no relevance at all.

The ease of use is good if you have a strong technical background. The intuitiveness of getting in there has a learning curve to it because there's a lot going on there, but with something that takes care of this many things in your environment, it's hard not to make it complex. They've done a pretty good job of trying to make it as uncomplicated as possible, but no matter what, you're going to have a learning curve to be able to use it effectively.

The Unified Security Management has made threat hunting a lot easier because we have it all in one view, but managing the environment has become a little bit more complex because we have one ruleset to cross the environment. So we really need to know what we're doing there. We've had to adapt a little bit towards that. Instead of having little rulesets all over the environment, we have one massive ruleset. We have to be a little bit more careful about what we're allowing because it can affect more than just the site you want to change. For example, if you want to change a device in New York, you have to be very careful that you don't affect a device in Boston as well, because it's all in this one unified policy.

Overall, Check Point has been a nine-plus out of 10 for me. I'm really happy with it. It's a very expensive solution, but everything has gone really well. There are bumps along the way, like with anything. I don't fault them for that. We've worked with it and we've worked around those problems and have come up with solutions that work for everybody. So everybody's happy in the end.

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 are able to use the solution for cloud protection and in parallel with or just for network protection. In our scenario, we use it as a border network firewall, which is based on a virtual environment and we're using it for the border protection of our network. 

We find Check Point valuable because they are 100% focused on security. It totally closes the potential vulnerability channel. We can check our mail and our attachments and we can scan everything easily. We get an immediate report about the situation of the attachments. We can discover if the target's security attack was started from phishing, etc. We also enjoy using the additional features that protect our internal customer from targeted attacks.

The stability of the solution could be improved, but this is the problem of all the solutions in the market. This isn't just a problem specific to Check Point.

The stability is good. It's really good compared with Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Cisco, most of all. But it definitely can be better.

The scalability of the solution is good. Right now, the solution protects about 400 customers.

The solution's technical support is good. If we have problems, we can speak directly to Check Point, or we can speak to one of their partners or a local partner. The solution has a great community that surrounds it.

The initial setup was complex because we were using a complex networking architecture. It took us about two days to implement the solution. For administration of all of this infrastructure, we need two people. For deployment and maintenance, we need just one person.

We used the implementation guide provided by the company to assist with deployment.

Our licensing is yearly at a fixed cost.

The solution has a very flexible pricing model. It can provide the same level of security and performance, but in parallel, can be subscription-based.

The solution is the on-premises deployment model which we use in our server environment.

We are an integration company, and although we deal with other solutions, we mainly focus on Check Point.

The solution is a great mix of user experience, flexibility, security features, and cost. After five years, I believe the total cost ownership will be much cheaper than any competitor.

The advice I would give to others interested in implementing is that this solution does have security problems. Not Check Point, per se, but in the network environment. The security recommendation from the Check Point and from us is to use the VSX in the internal network. It should not protect your border because there are some issues around bugs, etc. It could cause vulnerabilities if it's used this way. 

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

I use CloudGuard Network Security to enhance our cloud exchange points' security. Our customers can seamlessly connect across multiple clouds within the region, and CloudGuard provides next-generation firewall services to ensure their data and applications are protected.

CloudGuard Network Security has significantly improved our organization by helping us tap into the Check Point customer market.

The VPN features in CloudGuard Network Security have been the most valuable for us. It allows us to scale securely within our infrastructure, providing both strong security and VPN capabilities.

In the next release, including VRF support would be highly beneficial. Many customers have been requesting this feature, as it is currently lacking in Check Point's offerings, which can make architectural designs more cumbersome compared to competitors.

I have been working with CloudGuard Network Security for two and a half years.

As for scalability, it could be even better with VRF support, as it would allow for more efficient scaling without the need to deploy separate firewalls for different workloads.

CloudGuard Network Security has been quite stable.

I would rate technical support for CloudGuard as an eight out of ten.To make it a ten, I would expect more proactive assistance and smoother transitions between support levels.

Positive

When comparing CloudGuard Network Security to other solutions like Fortinet and Palo Alto Firewalls, they are similar in terms of identifying security threats. They all offer robust features such as antivirus, deep packet inspection, and IPS. Some of our customers have transitioned from Palo Alto to Check Point. While I don't have specific reasons, it could be related to factors like pricing.

We deployed it across multiple locations, utilizing AWS for SMS management. The environment was designed to ensure security and privacy, with all deployments being private despite being in the public cloud. Our implementation strategy was flexible, depending on the customer's needs, focusing on workload security first and then gradually migrating workloads. The initial deployment was straightforward.

One significant difference between CloudGuard Network Security and other solutions is the lack of VRF support. This means that when dealing with customers who have multiple segments and exchange points, deploying new firewalls becomes necessary. Competitors' solutions typically include VRF support, making scaling much easier and eliminating the need for additional firewall purchases.

We chose CloudGuard over other vendors because it allows us to provide unified security across multiple cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Unlike native cloud firewalls, CloudGuard offers scalability and the ability to expand across different platforms, meeting our customers' needs for consistent security across diverse cloud environments.

We implemented CloudGuard Network Security to meet our customers' demands for enhanced security features and centralized management. They specifically requested Check Point CloudGuard for its robust capabilities, including SMS and MDS for global management.

Using CloudGuard Duo Security has provided us with the ability to manage globally through MDS, which has been a valuable capability. It is convenient to have multiple pockets of global management from UniFi OS.

We realized the benefits of CloudGuard Duo Security quickly after deployment. Understanding the architecture, especially the MDS setup for higher-level organization control, allowed us to establish multiple pockets of management efficiently.

Unified security management allows us to streamline our security operations significantly. With centralized management through SMS and MDS, we can efficiently oversee not only the firewalls within our cloud exchange points but also on-premises devices, enabling a cohesive and unified security architecture across all environments.

I'm very confident in CloudGuard Network Security because it helps us secure our global network. With CloudGuard, we can set up rules to protect against risks from on-premises traffic and ensure security through various measures like single sign-on integration and VPN restrictions.

CloudGuard Network Security is a great product that fulfills firewall needs effectively and provides detailed insights. However, in multi-segment environments requiring multiple VRFs, it can be cumbersome and costly due to the need for separate firewalls.

The best lesson I have learned from using CloudGuard Network Security is to carefully consider the scalability requirements of each environment. While Check Point offers robust features, the lack of VRF support can lead to increased costs and complexity, especially in multi-segment setups where separate firewalls are needed for each segment.

Overall, I would rate CloudGuard Network Security as an eight out of ten.

We place our CloudGuard Network Security gateways at the front on Azure, positioned with a load balancer. The configuration includes a load balancer and gateways on a virtual automation scale set in Azure. 

The solution is easier to manage than an on-premise firewall. It is easy to manage. The use of dynamic objects for these gateways made it easy to create the right rules and the right policies. Integration with Azure is also easy where we have to just add the subnets. In an on-premise setup, we have to add everything from scratch. We can automate a lot of actions.

We have the product deployed on Azure China. One crucial concern is the version limitation; unfortunately, in Azure China, we are restricted to running version R80. Our architecture has a Load Balancer, VMSS CloudGuard, etc. The duplication in this setup prevents the application from seeing the original client IP. This poses a problem for certain applications that require the original IP for login purposes. Although we managed a workaround with a different architecture involving a WAF, it is not as straightforward as the standard Azure setup.

I have been using the product for two years. However, my company has been using it for five to six years. 

CloudGuard Network Security's stability is high. 

The solution's scalability is good. 

We typically open tickets with our partner, but there was one instance where they couldn't provide a solution. In that case, we opened a ticket with Check Point directly, and they responded within four hours, resolving the issue.

We initially used on-premise solutions, starting with Juniper firewalls. However, when we migrated to Check Point for IPS protection, the experience was really good.

We have seen ROI with the product's use. It helps us reduce the manhours with upgrades and odd fixes. We can automate the process. It takes only a small amount of time. On-premise solutions require informing users about potential interruptions and, in worst-case scenarios, significant disruptions. The process involves extensive preparation, including ensuring that the necessary conditions are met for updating the cluster members one at a time. In contrast, on Azure, automation simplifies everything.

We tried to use Azure Firewall for one application as a proof of concept. However, Check Point is easier for us. 

We operate in a hybrid cloud environment with both on-premises and Azure, but we don't currently use other cloud providers like Amazon. Our on-premises SmartConsole remains in use, and overall, everything is running smoothly. Our confidence in the product is high. We believe that we can do better with its help. I would rate it a nine out of ten because it's very good with high potency and potential. However, it's not perfect. I faced issues with Azure China, and it's not as straightforward on other cloud platforms.