Check Point CloudGuard Network Security Reviews

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security helps resolve potential regulatory and compliance issues when moving to the cloud. The high-visibility rule base's granular approach helps us with potential security leaks and highlights items to focus on for immediate action.

The functionality that we're using it for is the cloud firewall piece.

For this reason, it was necessary to implement this tool in our organization and the results have been very positive, providing the necessary security.

One of the main characteristics that Check Point CloudGuard Network Security has given us is granularity and visibility. The data that enters our Azure environment integrates in a great way in the cloud and in on-premises. This is important for the alerts and the response to incidents that arise in our platform in the cloud, for the moment, we are very satisfied to have acquired this solution and to have implemented it in the cloud and with other systems on-premise that have given us a lot of security and peace of mind.

One of the features that I liked the most and that I feel is very useful is auto-scaling. Our Azure cloud environment is constantly growing and this allows us to expand as well. 

Another very accurate feature is CloudGuard's malware prevention and exploit resistance rate and they have given us a lot of security since the database is very large. 

It is easy to manage CloudGuard from on-premises and offers the same protection as we can provide to the rest of our environments, which is a great advantage for us.

One of the areas that should be improved is the updates of the products. It is somewhat problematic in the area of the cloud. In the case of migration from on-premise to the cloud, it is difficult to replace the licenses. It should be something very transparent and thus save us the time to go to support but in general, the tool is shared very well in security and protection of privacy and if they are lucky they can add more features that help us our security would be great they should always be one step ahead of cyberattacks.

We have implemented it one year ago.

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security maintains very good stability, and, best of all, maintains excellent compatibility with Azure.

The scalability is great. You can make a network scale up or down. This allows you to have good control of bandwidth in the organization or to be able to distribute it in the different departments of the company.

Currently, since the implementation, not much support has been used, therefore, I rate it as excellent.

Positive

The Check Point brand has always been used in our organization.

The configuration was very simple since the tool and the wizard are very interactive and user-friendly. It was not very difficult to do the installation and configuration.

The implementation started with a vendor and the IT team. The engineer that worked with us presented great knowledge of the product.

By using a tool of this type, the cost of personnel decreases since the tool performs quite well with the functions that it was designed for.

The price and the licenses have been good. They maintain a competitive price with the other companies.

Other options were not evaluated as we like to keep the same brand across solutions.

When doing a cloud deployment, remember you are doing this in the cloud so treat it like a cloud device, as good configuration brings good results.

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.

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

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

The Capsule solution and application filters are the most valuable. 

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

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

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

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

It is pretty stable.

With the virtual assistant, its scalability is very good.

Their technical support is really good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As we are moving our workloads to the cloud, it means that we now have a need to protect our cloud infrastructure. This will ensure that our business is deploying products faster and with all of the required security.

Our solution needs to be able to protect workloads hosted on multiple clouds with the required security control. The license should be a subscription-based model so that we can add or remove depending upon the requirement to scale.

It needs to support a microservice platform such as Docker or another container, and it should be quick to deploy.

This solution gives us advanced threat prevention to protect our workloads from attacks including zero-day and other types of attacks.

It is able to provide cloud network security along with orchestration and automation. It also provides consolidated, consistent visibility and management across all clouds including public, private, and hybrid environments.

This product is quick to deploy, scalable, and is a fully functional firewall available in the cloud. We were able to scale as required based on load and performance. With Covid-19, our users, including our Customer Center agents, are completely remote and rely on Check Point Cloud Guard to provide flexibility and seamless access. 

We have the ability to easily encrypt/decrypt traffic according to the security policy, as well as integrate between Active Directory, Cloud Guard Azure objects & application control.

It provides micro-segmentation functionality through complete visibility and control of traffic following between EAST-WEST and North-SOUTH with VPC and Outside VPC.

We are using multiple security features including the firewall, DLP, IPS, application control, IPsec VPN, Antivirus, and Anti-Bot. SandBlast provides Threat Extraction and Threat Emulation for zero-day attacks.

SSL/TLS traffic inspection features are used for advanced threat prevention against secure SSL traffic.

Unified Security Management provides security policy management, enforcement, and reporting for public, private, hybrid-clouds, and on-premises networks in a single-pane-of-glass.

Seamless cloud-native integration with Azure, AWS, GCP, Oracle Cloud, and more.

System hardening could be improved, as password complexity is not enforced by default on root / command-line passwords.

The documentation provided by Check Point can be rough and needs to have a lot more detail incorporated in order to help the implementor and administrator.

The HA failover time is not as fast as expected and due to this, the convergence time between cluster members is still not perfect. Consequently, there may be an issue in migrating the mission-critical business applications. 

Micro-Segmentation functionality for EAST-WEST traffic is not native and requires integration with a third-party OEM.

We are performing a PoC with the product. 

As with other Check Point products, this solution is scalable.

Support from OEM is excellent.

We have a different solution that works in silos and we are doing this PoC to check the functionality/features.

Integration and setting up the solution are straightforward.

We are performing our PoC with assistance from the OEM.

The cost is on the higher side, as it is based on workload, hence we need to decide which VPC or workload needs to be part of CloudGuard.

We did not evaluate other options.

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.

The perimeter firewall provides me control over my perimeter servers and devices.

Current cloud applications are getting good protection from CASB solutions but they are limited to data leakage and application control. Beyond that, I require something to monitor my data that flows inside of my cloud application.

Sophisticated threats, such as zero-day attacks, can't be controlled by CASB solutions. Instead, they require something that can work using artificial intelligence. They should have a correlation with machine learning algorithms to defend against today's attacks for my cloud applications.

Sophisticated attacks can't be prevented using normal SaaS security. CloudGuard SaaS is a technology that prevents not only sophisticated attacks but offers protection email threats.

Most attacks that succeed are because of SPAM emails. When users fall into an attacker's trap, Check Point's industry-leading technology provides maximum protection. It is effective against email phishing attacks and provides visibility over shadow IT applications.

Along with an email security solution, CloudGuard adds another layer of comprehensive security and we can completely rely on it.

CloudGuard comes with the best feature sets that include protection from Zero-Day attacks, which we usually get when we have blades on the perimeter firewall. These are analyzed using SandBlast Threat Emulation and SandBlast Extraction.

We are able to easily identify users who are going to use cloud applications when they log in from either a trusted network or device.

We have complete visibility of attacks originating from email including spear-phishing, spoofing, etc.

Based on the reputation of the domain and URL, the firewall allows traffic to flow.

I would like this product to provide functionality like a web application firewall, where we can fully monitor all traffic passing both to and from the cloud.

The latency should be minimized by having multiple entry points all across the world. Nearby requests will have lower latency access to cloud applications.

It would be useful to have AD integration with an on-premises server.

The API integration is complex, which is an area that should be improved.

Onboarding this product takes some expertise because it is complex compared to other services that Check Point provides.

We have been using Check Point CloudGuard Network for more than a year.

Need to focus on stability.

This solution is highly scalable.

Technical support, along with presales engineers have good knowledge of the product.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup is a mixture of straightforward and complex.

We deployed vendor

Although I don't have specifics for pricing, based on my overall experience, I can conclude that Check Point provides the best pricing when comparing to other vendors.

We did not evaluate other products.

CloudGuard is cloud-native security that secures your public, private, or hybrid environment under a unified platform, which can also be automated. It comes with multiple installation availabilities such as Software-as-a-Service(SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS), and more.

This solution can be installed on leading Cloud Service Providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Platform, and Microsoft Azure, as well as on other not-so-known CSPs such as OCI.

This is helpful for clients who always thought upgrading hardware in the DC or testing new versions to be difficult. Normally, they have trouble due to some issue at hand or maybe due to sizing, but now they have an easy way to test the solutions and they can be accessed securely from all around the globe. It provides features such as Auto Scaling to deal with unforeseen situations with minimal costs.

It is quite easy to construct and destruct and doesn't need anyone to actually step into a DC, which is good because sometimes this needs endless approvals.

The solution comes with Active Load balancing and policies that can be installed before the traffic hits the firewall module.

Auto Scaling is one of the features that make me want to choose CloudGuard over actual HW.

Cloud leaders such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft also provide an uptime of 99.99%, which might not be possible in a privately owned DC. Multiple instances where a hardware issue was found and it took weeks to replace the hardware and bring services up can now be fixed within few minutes by utilizing the available resources over CSP.

You get charged only for what resources you choose and how much traffic actually passes through the firewall, which in turn saves a lot of money.

Easier optimization techniques can definitely help with better performance of the OS, as using the vanilla software doesn't actually showcase the real capability of the software.

While there is a lot of documentation available on Support Center to understand how the solution works, it can become quite confusing. Some free training videos by Check Point would really help the engineers who don't have full access due to restrictions/unseen reasons.

A step-by-step guide for leading CSPs would really help.

Auto Scaling should be given as an option during a first-time installation, as it would be really beneficial and some users might not be aware of it.

We have been using Check Point CloudGuard Network for more than three years, starting when it was still called vSEC.

I have worked with other products and find that this is the better solution when compared to other vendors in the market.

My advice is to use the trial and understand whether this is what you are really looking for.