Check Point CloudGuard Network Security Reviews

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.

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.

We utilize CloudGuard Network Security for internet surfing and handle inter-sector traffic between VPCs. Specifically, we have over 200 accounts in AWS, each with its own VPC. The solution interconnects all the regions. 

The tool's most valuable feature is its scalability. You will only have to pay less for scaling up. Its notable benefit is deployment complexity. Regional deployment is simpler compared to on-premise setup. 

When upgrading the firewall, the old VPC containing the firewalls needs to be destroyed. After that, a new firewall is redeployed in the setup. Additionally, there's a need to separate the routing, and the routing from the old VPC has to be recreated in the new one.

I have been using the product for two years. 

We had issues with stability. We have an open ticket at the support regarding this. 

CloudGuard Network Security is scalable. 

The tool's support is good. 

Positive

CloudGuard Network Security is not too cheap. 

I don't see any difference in user experience between on-prem and the cloud setup. We have an MDS environment where we can manage the whole country. The tool enables us to manage policies on the same platform for branches and regions in the country. I rate the product an eight out of ten. 

We use it to protect Internet access from our AWS environment.

Before we implemented CloudGuard, we had no filtering on what was accessed on the internet from our AWS environment. 

Now, we can filter which websites users can access and block categories that are a risk. For example, we can block social media and gambling sites. This has helped to decrease the risk of access to malicious content on the internet.

It allows us to filter what the servers on AWS can access on the Internet and allows us to filter in terms of IPS, antivirus, and so on, for the contents that are accessed on the Internet.

The complexity to deploy should be decreased. 

I have been using this solution for about five years. 

It is a stable solution. It has been pretty stable for us. We haven't faced any problems since it rolled out. 

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. We have around 200 end users using this solution in our company. 

The customer service and support from the vendor take a lot of time. 

The first line of support is not very good. They usually start with junior engineers when you open a case, which can be time-consuming.

Neutral

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, where one is easy and ten is difficult to setup. 

For the deployment, we work with the vendor. So, the deployment took two weeks.

We need to provision the firewall, deploy the manager, and understand where the firewall needs to connect, which AWS area, and so on.

We just needed more than two people for the deployment. We worked with the security network security architect and called them engineers.

With ten being very expensive, I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten. 

It is expensive.

It's worth it in the sense that it can protect your network, and it's very scalable.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We have a constant need to evolve and are migrating towards the cloud due to greater availability and better benefits at the level of hardware and computing.

With the understanding that we must have a faster, more efficient team with greater benefits when creating equipment or application services, we were looking for a solution with high user acceptance. We also wanted to meet the external and internal needs of the company and maintain solid corporate governance that includes offering the highest level of security standards. This product allowed us to create that level of security and develop natively in the cloud.  

The product has allowed us to develop applications from the cloud - even with large environments and well-segmented security lines. We're managing to prevent threats from any front with automated security. We can easily design, install, and configure everything from the cloud in a coherent way. It's easy to establish security policies to manage local and cloud environments now.

I am turning to a multi-cloud solution. Being able to achieve analysis and prevention of advanced threats and security in the network regardless of the environment has been great. It doesn't matter whether they are hybrid clouds, local networks can be resolved entirely in the cloud, and everything is managed from a single panel. We've managed to achieve a centralized visualization of our infrastructure, giving us greater insights and an overview of everything that happens in the organization.

The CloudGuard Network Security solution has given us an overview yet has allowed us to segment the cloud in many ways. We can create networks where we can separate the data, information, and structure of history. We can segment databases into smaller groups by type or quality of the resource. 

We're able to validate in a logical and physical way across layers and can segment data to allow for greater reach in terms of management. In the future, we'd like characteristics to be further simplified. While today we can manage some scopes, there are still some segments in the OSI layer we cannot manage. We'd like visibility on security and perimeter management qualities in order to reach other layers of the OSI model. Right now, we don't have the scope to reach some physical layers. 

I've been using the solution for less than a year.