Check Point CloudGuard Network Security Reviews

Positive

My customers use the solution for technical and internal Azure resources, including remote access VPN.

Some retail customers find the scale-up and scale-down features valuable, particularly with scale sets. This is useful for handling increased loads on devices and utilizing firewalls, similar to on-premises setups with active standby configurations.

The solution allows customers to migrate workloads securely into the cloud space with a trusted vendor, maintaining everything under a single platform. This ensures visibility into their cloud environments similar to on-premises setups, all managed through a single smart console. 

Unified security management simplifies operations by providing visibility into both cloud and on-premises infrastructure. The skill set required to manage it remains the same for both environments.

The level of confidence in CloudGuard Network Security, both for myself and my customers, is very high. The product operates familiarly, consistent with what customers are used to, and it is a trusted name in the space.

Based on my previous experience, there were improvements, especially in in-place upgrades. Regarding cost, it might be potentially cheaper considering resource utilization in Azure and VM costs, but licensing could be improved, possibly moving towards a simpler model.

I have been using the product for four to five years. 

CloudGuard Network Security has improved its stability. It is a stable platform. 

The tool has improved its scalability over the four years. 

The support experience can be hit or miss. It depends on the expertise of the support representative. Some are highly skilled and knowledgeable, while others require more guidance. There might be room for improvement in this aspect.

Neutral

The tool's deployment is straightforward, whether through the marketplace or templates. It offers flexibility for making amendments before deployment. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the solution an eight. The ease of deployment, the single management function, and the features it provides, especially in terms of scale sets and scaling, contribute to it being a solid platform. Many customers are increasingly interested in using it to protect their assets within Azure and AWS, which are the two main areas of operation.

If a colleague is considering purchasing the solution for its security features and licensing, my advice would be to ensure correct deployment. While the solutions are generally straightforward to deploy, there are nuances, especially in Azure infrastructure, that can make troubleshooting more challenging. It's crucial to either use a knowledgeable partner for deployment or ensure a clear understanding of the process before proceeding, as it may be more complicated than anticipated.

We use it to protect cloud infrastructure, workloads, and applications from advanced threats and attacks.

For our operations team, CloudGuard proved to be the ideal solution. Troubleshooting became much simpler as all traffic—allowed or blocked—could be found in a single point, the SmartConsole. Integrating CloudGuard with VMware was straightforward; we established a connection between Check Point Management and VMware, allowing for the automated deployment of CloudGuard in NSX as a service. This automation made deployment and management a breeze, allowing us to easily specify the number of CloudGuard instances needed, which would then be deployed automatically.

CloudGuard's integration with the SmartConsole ensured continuity for our administrators, who could continue using familiar tools and methods. The ability to manage everything within the virtual environment provided speed and flexibility. With CloudGuard, we could define rules to control traffic with precision, redirecting or blocking as needed. 

Check Point's approach of preventing threats at the outset aligns with this perspective, eliminating the need to constantly battle against incoming threats. This proactive stance instills a strong sense of security, as it significantly reduces the likelihood of breaches. Given our positive experiences and lack of any negative encounters with the product, we feel extremely confident in its ability to safeguard our environment effectively.

One of the most crucial and beneficial aspects of Check Point is its ability to consolidate and present logs in a clear and easily accessible manner. This centralized approach offers immense value, as it allows users to access all network security information from a single point, eliminating the need to navigate through multiple tools and sources. With Check Point, users can conveniently find and manage all security-related data in one centralized location.

Its centralized control, ease of use, and flexibility are the most valuable for our data center security.

The licensing structure is unclear, so a transparent and flexible licensing structure would be preferable.

We have been working with it for five years.

In terms of stability and reliability, the virtual machine running CloudGuard functions seamlessly and as anticipated, demonstrating no issues or disruptions.

Regarding scalability, you have the flexibility to deploy as many instances as necessary. If additional instances are required, you can easily add them to production by obtaining the necessary licenses.

While we haven't encountered significant issues necessitating support, we did face occasional challenges with perimeter gateways rather than CloudGuard itself.

Before this project, we collaborated with a sister company that utilized Cisco ACI, but it didn't prove to be the right fit. Considering our longstanding partnership with Check Point as our security provider, particularly for network and cloud traffic, choosing CloudGuard for East-West traffic inspection seemed like a natural extension. Additionally, observing our sister company's positive experience with CloudGuard on Cisco ACI further reinforced our confidence in the product as the best solution for our needs.

Initially, we sought the help of a partner for deployment, but for upgrades and migrations, we largely handled them ourselves. Fortunately, these processes weren't overly complex, and we found helpful documentation on the Check Point website to guide us through them.

When we initially adopted CloudGuard, we operated under a different licensing model based on the number of hosts. The licensing model has since transitioned to a cluster-based variant.

Overall, I would rate it ten out of ten.

For any private cloud data center leveraging software-defined networking through VMware or Cisco ACI, CloudGuard stands out as the optimal choice. It offers unparalleled flexibility and ease of management, making it the ideal solution for customers already utilizing Check Point in conjunction with virtual networks within their data centers.

The solution helps protect network security by offering threat prevention, addressing vulnerabilities, and utilizing blades. 

We use it for the protection of our internal services. We're a Telco company, our internal users are on the machines. We also have some external services that we protect. We protect our customers and our public cloud with it.

VMware is our public cloud provider. 

Threat prevention is the biggest benefit we see from it. 

The network security is the most valuable aspect of CloudGuard. I am a network engineer so it's the most relevant feature to me.

CloudGuard Network Security provides us with unified security management across hybrid-clouds and on-prem. We manage all of those environments through this one solution. 

It's user-friendly. It's a multi-domain solution. CloudGuard is really, really good. 

I have experience with FortiGate and Cisco. I worked with them at previous jobs. FortiGate is easy and user-friendly when it comes to the configuration, but it is unstable in some countries and the routing tables have problems. The configuration of the network is in the same management platform, which might be better for some.

In comparison, CloudGaurd is very stable.

Cisco is hard to use, FortiGate is easy and CloudGuard is somewhere in the middle when it comes to ease of use. 

When it comes to identifying security threats, CloudGuard is really good compared to its competition.

I am confident that CloudGuard's Network Security can protect us. It enables me to sleep very well at night.

We utilize logging systems, and geolocation is crucial for us as some applications must only be accessible from our country. However, there have been occasional issues with this feature. It drops requests. It's not always precise. 

I have been using the product for two years. 

My team has been using it for five to six years. 

CloudGuard Network Security is very stable. 

We have 28 licenses. We have 800 servers on our private cloud. 

Their support is fast. They answer quickly.

Positive

We integrate with NSX. The setup wasn't hard.

We have seen ROI. It saves us time because it's stable. It's easily administered. We have time to do other tasks. It is easy. 

Licensing is complicated. When a license expires, we have to renew it and the process is complicated. They should make the process easier.

Using CloudGuard Network Security saves time due to its stability and ease of administration. The solution is not complex, allowing administrators to focus on other tasks. The configuration process is straightforward. It can integrate with NSX. 

I rate the product a nine out of ten. We manage a total of 800 servers that host a variety of components, including our infrastructure, customer applications, databases, application sites, and disaster recovery systems

The architecture proposed is based on Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework enterprise-scale landing zone architecture. Enterprise-scale is an architectural approach and a reference implementation that enables effective construction and operationalization of landing zones on Azure at scale.

We're using CloudGuard solution in a NorthBound - SouthBound design to protect and filter both incoming and outgoing traffic.

Also, we are using a VMSS solution deployed in Azure, with a minimum of two instances

The design is based on a "Hub & Spoke" model in which the environment is set up as a system of connections arranged as a kind of bicycle wheel where the spokes are connected to a central point in the hub, and all traffic to and from the spokes passes through this hub.

The NorthBound/SouthBound design solution allows traffic to be scanned and filtered both when entering (NB) and exiting (SB) the organization.

This design is also extremely suitable for segmenting a network. Network segmentation is usually done to reduce the attack surface of the network and limit the ability of a malicious threat to spread freely across the network.

Also, CloudGuard came with a new benefit in terms of scalability, with the VMSS solution capable of auto-scale in or out, depending on the resource demand.

The most valuable aspects of the solution include:

• Easy to administer and also to deploy, thanks to automated setup with pre-configured templates. On top of that, security comes first.
• The proactive threat detection results in huge risk reduction.
• It has a user-friendly interface; it's best in the market for policy management and log monitoring.
• There are multiple options to deploy (clustering, standalone, VMSS and single management solution, SMS or MDS, and even better: Infinity Portal).
• It has a really strong user community, which seems to compensate for the very poor vendor support.
• The capability to auto-scale in or out, depending on the resource demand is great.

Vendor support might be the weakest point of the CloudGuard solution. You really struggle to find a CloudGuard specialist, even for simple tasks. As mentioned before, you can find better answers to the user community (which is actually a downside of the product).

There are lots of limitations and discrepancies across different Cloud provider deployments.

Documentation might become too complex or too spread out, especially for newcomers.

As in the past, with traditional Check Point firewalls, it sometimes seems to be moving too fast with software releases and upgrade cycles, which are difficult to keep up with.

I have been using Check Point for more than ten years - and CloudGuard for almost a year.

In my company, we use the solution just to secure my AWS Network Insights and inside production. We use it for security purposes.

With the solution, we just need to filter the traffic coming from the internet and Direct Connect. So it filters the traffic, basically. It permits access. In short, it just filters the traffic and permits the traffic. The aforementioned details are the purposes for which we use the tool.

We use the tool as a basic firewall. It's a technical firewall. As a technical firewall, we use SmartConsole or Check Point Firewall.

The deployment phase takes too much time. I would like the deployment to be faster.

I have been using Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for two and a half years. We are using Check Point R80.10 SmartConsole in our organization.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten since it takes too much time for deployment. However, it is flexible since we used to push the policy normally. It takes hardly ten seconds to install the policy. It's much easier.

I have been using the solution in my company for the last year. Other than the employees in my company, more than 25,000 users are using the solution hosted on AWS.

Basically, the application, which is hosted, is used internally. It's the same user account because it's not exposed anywhere on the internet. If anyone wants to access the solution from the internet, the traffic comes from Direct Connect, and from Direct Connect, it goes to AWS.

The initial setup was not much complex. The setup phase was good enough to be able to navigate through it.

It took a long time to deploy it. We need to run this on EC2 instances, so it took almost two hours to deploy the solution. After deploying the solution slowly, and gradually, we have to push the policy on the firewall. It takes time to deploy, but it's a stable one.

The solution is deployed on the cloud. It's a software we install in EC2 instances on AWS, which we use as a firewall.

We currently have six to seven resources managing the deployments and maintenance.

During deployment, we took technical help from Check Point.

It is a good-to-use tool that is also flexible.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We use the solution to secure cloud infrastructures and manage incoming and outgoing traffic. Our clients operating in hybrid environments must ensure robust security for their applications and data.

The platform has significantly improved our organization's security posture by providing comprehensive threat detection and response capabilities, enhancing the overall security of our cloud applications and data.

The solution's most valuable features include sandboxing, application control, and the remote access blade. Sandboxing is essential for isolating potentially malicious files, while application control allows us to manage user access effectively.

The solution's future releases would benefit from incorporating more advanced machine learning capabilities for real-time threat detection and enhanced user interface options for ease of use.

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

The product is highly scalable and easily adapts to the growing needs of our clients' cloud environments.

The technical support team is knowledgeable and responsive. 

Positive

The initial setup was relatively straightforward, requiring careful configuration to align with our security policies.

We implemented the product through our in-house team, which was well-trained in the solution's features.

The return on investment has been substantial, as the enhanced security features have prevented potential breaches, saving costs related to security incidents.

I evaluated other options, including Palo Alto, but ultimately chose Check Point for its robust security features and user-friendly interface.

I highly recommend CloudGuard for organizations looking to enhance cloud security due to its comprehensive features and strong track record.

I rate it a ten out of ten. 

We are using CloudGuard Network Security to protect North-South traffic or VPCs. We are using the CloudGuard firewall between the Internet and VPCs. All the traffic needs to pass through the firewall.

CloudGuard Network Security provides features, such as threat emulation, that native cloud solutions do not offer. AWS, Azure, and GCP have a lot of features, but you sometimes need to pay charges for specific features. With Check Point products, you have all these features in one license. You pay once and you can use everything.

CloudGuard Network Security improves our security against advanced threats. Others do not offer features like threat emulation out of the box. CloudGuard Network Security protects very well against advanced threats.

We have a high level of confidence in our cloud network security by using CloudGuard Network Security. The product is similar to what we use in traditional data centers. The infrastructure is almost the same. The way to manage the policies is the same. It is very easy to implement and manage CloudGuard networks. There is some difference when you are using auto-provision, but in the end, it is the same technology. It is easy for a traditional network engineer to work with CloudGuard.

We did not go for the cloud vendor's cloud firewall because we wanted to be able to manage all the firewalls, policies, and other things from a single point. 

The most valuable feature for me is that you have just one license. You can test and implement everything you need with one license. You do not need to pay for separate module licenses when you want IPS or other features. The license includes everything that you need.

The version upgrades need improvement. We faced issues while upgrading our CloudGuard Network Gateway. When we tried to use the template that Check Point offers on their site, it was not available for the second to the latest version, so I was forced to upgrade my management server. That was very challenging for us.

I have been working with Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for 8 years.

I cannot remember the last time I had an issue. It is stable, but every product has a few bugs. If you maintain the configuration and the versions, everything is fine.

We do not have any problems because we can use the auto-provision templates. If I need to scale up or scale down, I can do this. If there is any issue, it is very transparent. For example, if I lose my gateway, the manager will automatically create a gateway and bring everything up.

Their support is very good. Their response is fast. You can contact an engineer in a few minutes, but it depends on the severity of the issue. In the case of a high-severity issue, you can talk to an engineer to assist you with an issue.

Compared to other vendors our company has been working with, Check Point has better support. They have the best technical staff.

Positive

We only use Check Point products. In our data center, we are only using CloudGuard.

It is very easy. With a few clicks, you can implement your firewall. 

It is fair. Its license covers all the features. There is a cost-benefit. The licensing for the cloud is better than on-premises because, with on-premises, you have to pay separately for different things.

Overall, I would rate CloudGuard Network Security a nine out of ten.