Check Point CloudGuard Network Security Reviews

We use Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for the firewall. The firewall protects our various customers in the optic cloud.

Check Point CloudGuard is quick to deploy and easy for the customer to use. The user interface is user-friendly and easy to use.

The solution is not that flexible when deploying on-prem.

I have been using Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for six months.

We have had many performance issues with Check Point CloudGuard on the cloud. The issue is with the OS version at this point.

Because we are in the demo phase of using Check Point CloudGuard, we only have a small amount of users, all in our IT department.

Personally, I have not had to reach out to customer service and support, however, I understand that our clients have many clinical issues.

Positive

The initial deployment is easy. The length of time to deploy depends on the number of customers, or the number of websites the customer has. It can take anywhere from one day to a few days to deploy Check Point CloudGuard.

We use an in-house technical team to deploy the solution.

Check Point CloudGuard is proving to be a good solution for both the profit of the company and for deployment for the customer.

Check Point CloudGuard is a suitable solution for many customers that are using the cloud.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of 10.

Our company works in the area of developing and delivering online gambling platforms. The Check Point Next-Generation Firewalls are the core security solution that we use for the protection of our DataCenter environment located in Asia (Taiwan).

The environment has about 50 physical servers as virtualization hosts, and we have two HA Clusters that consist of 2x5400 hardware appliances, managed by an OpenServer Security Management Server on a Virtual Machine (KVM), all running on R80.10 with the latest JumboHotfix.

The Check Point Virtual Systems are activated on the NGFWs to logically divide the firewall into two parts. One is for serving internal, intra-VLAN traffic, and the other is for serving the external traffic coming from the Internet.

The overall security of the environment has been greatly improved by implementing the Check Point Virtual Systems solution. Before deploying it, we relied on the Cisco ACLs and Zone-Based firewalls configured on the switches and routers, which in fact is a simple stateful firewall, and currently appears to be not an efficient solution for protection from advanced threats.

The Check Point Virtual Systems solution has significantly increased the security level from the standpoint of the logical separation of traffic patterns, both internal and external in our particular case.

This product makes the NGFWs work as if we had two separate sets of physical firewalls, without additional spendings on the hardware.

The main benefit of the Check Point Virtual Systems solution is its ability to split up the hardware appliances that we have into several logical, virtual devices with separate traffic handling policies, as well as the switching and routing. This allowed us to save significant money on the hardware purchase, and keep our NGFWs efficiently loaded. 

As an administrator, I find the management really convenient and cozy. The usual SmartConsole is used and you don't need any additional software to be installed.

As an administrator, I can say that among all of the Check Point products I have been working with so far, the Virtual Systems solution is one of the most difficult. You need to understand a lot of the underlying concepts to configure it, like the virtual switches and routers it uses underneath. That leads to additional time needed for the initial configuration if you don't have previous experience.

In addition, there is a list of limitations connected specifically with the virtual systems, like the inability to work with the VTI interfaces in a VPN blade, or an unsupported DLP software blade.

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

The solution is stable and we haven't had any support cases opened that are connected with it.

The solution is scalable. I believe you could just add the new hardware into the cluster without affecting the functionality, and thus increasing the performance on the spot.

We have had several support cases opened, but none of them were connected with the Virtual Systems. 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 have any logical separation of security solutions before implementing this product.

The solution was really complex and difficult to implement since it requires a lot of additional knowledge and understanding of the underlying routing and switching technologies and protocols.

Our in-team has a Check Point Certified engineer as part of it.

Since we have already had the Check Point NGFWs purchased, we just proceeded with the configuration of the Virtual Systems.

What could be improved in this product is its architecture. Its user interface also needs improvement.

The user experience, particularly in the implementation, management, and operations of this product, also needs to be improved.

Operations management is difficult in Check Point CloudGuard Cloud Network Security.

I've been using Check Point CloudGuard Cloud Network Security for seven years.

I find this product stable. It's a good product.

Check Point CloudGuard Cloud Network Security has good scalability.

I'm giving technical support for this product a five out of ten.

My advice to people looking into implementing Check Point CloudGuard Cloud Network Security is that they should have technical expertise before deploying it.

I'm giving Check Point CloudGuard Cloud Network Security an eight out of ten.

The security features of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security are very good.

The solution could improve to have a DLP feature.

I have been using Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for approximately three years.

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is stable.

The scalability is good.

The initial deployment is easy. However, the implementation can be complex.

My advice to others is to evaluate the products first and then proceed.

I rate Check Point CloudGuard Network Security an eight out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The scalability is very good.

Technical support is very good.

The initial setup is easy.

The team that helped us was very good.

The ROI we've had has been very good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are a solution integrator and the Check Point CloudGuard Network is a product that I have experience with. We implement firewalls and other products for our customers.

The most valuable feature is threat prevention.

The initial setup is complex and could be made simpler.

The console could use some improvement.

I have been working with the Check Point CloudGuard Network for approximately three years.

This product is quite scalable.

I also have experience with Cisco Firepower and Fortinet.

This initial setup is complex.

Licensing is available on a monthly or yearly basis.

In summary, this is a good product and I have not found any problems when using it. I can recommend it to others.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.