Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management Reviews

CloudGuard is a tool for evaluating the health and configuration of an account. We primarily use it for AWS, but we also use it for Azure. I also use it for inventory and historical reporting.

We work with 50 AWS accounts. Four teams across a couple of time zones use CloudGuard. Our security and DevOps teams are the primary users, but the support team occasionally uses it. Management consumes the output and the reports. I think it makes them feel good, so that's nice. 

I haven't dipped into CloudGuard's agentless or shift-left capabilities, but I'm interested. Unfortunately, I'm strapped for resources and time and haven't been able to get more value out of my tooling. I'd like to, but I haven't had a good chance to look at that yet.

I recently transitioned into a management and architecture role. CloudGuard helped me delegate to my engineers the day-to-day tasks of operational care and feeding and health assessments of the environments. I previously spent more time building rules and implementing automatic remediations. Now, I let it fly, and my engineers operate it. 

I helped with the design and build, and I was originally in charge of the run. I've now handed off the run, which enabled me to do more. I think it helped those guys to be effective and do more. I'd say it freed up the equivalent of a quarter to an eighth of an FTE.

CloudGuard allows us to scale. As we bring on customers, more accounts come online, and more platforms are deployed in our environment, I don't have to scale my team linearly with the growth of our product. These rules work over and over on the number of accounts. I think that's a place where it will help us as our customer base grows.

The security operations team saved some time. I'm on the team, so I do a lot with this. It's one of the essential tools. Depending on the incident, Check Point can be extremely helpful in understanding the configuration. I use it ad hoc or tactically in those conditions. At the same time, other operations or security incidents are out of view of Check Point and Dome9, so it doesn't come into play. When the problem is at the account or configuration level, it makes remediation and troubleshooting an investigation easier.

It saves time because I can look across the organization. Instead of checking 50 different accounts atomically and spending 15 minutes investigating each, I can spend 15 minutes exploring all 50 accounts. It allows me to quickly look across the org for similar problems when one comes up. That's a huge time saver. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to create a reference rule set and use that to evaluate an account's health. It provides daily reports on any drift from that rule set and real-time alerts. Some of the automated remediations are also helpful.

I like the GSL Builder, which helped us reduce human error. It helps answer a question quickly in real-time that I might not want to put into a specific rule that I evaluate across all my accounts all the time. In many cases, we've built rules that we consider everywhere for the posture of all our essential accounts. However, I often work on an issue or question, and I just want to see who has this configuration or misconfiguration. GSL Builder lets me quickly locate all the S3 buckets with a faulty configuration. I use it tactically like that sometimes.

I'd be sad if it went away. However, you couldn't throw an inexperienced person at it and expect them to get any value from it without some handholding or spending time to read the documentation and think about it. You must know about the asset you interrogate to write a good rule or to do a good evaluation. That isn't a Check Point problem, but it's a general issue in cloud security. 

CloudGuard offers several pre-packaged rules for various evaluations, such as NIST, 853, etc. I went through them, found 50 rules I think are handy, and put them into a custom rule set. Then, I spent time writing about 30 rules specific to my environment. I use those to evaluate the health of my accounts continuously. 

We check health insurer information because all this data is highly confidential and protected by HIPAA. We use these rules to evaluate our cloud properties constantly. I can't imagine the time that would take to perform this kind of evaluation by hand or using another tool. That's why we have Check Point.

There are many auto-remediations available. We use a few and wrote a couple of our own. It's an excellent risk management tool. We use it because we're so paranoid about the security of our environment. I've used this tool at other companies in different industries, and they've been apprehensive about automatic remediation. It depends on the part of the world you live in. I use it, and it stopped problems, so I've gotten tremendous value from auto-remediation.

The ability to prioritize alerts has been handy. It enables me to focus on critical issues instead of common misconfiguration. The visibility into my workloads is pretty good but not great. I don't use it at a granular level. I'm primarily focused on protecting my overall cloud posture and the health of the account with CloudGuard, but I also look for some common misconfigurations that might be workload-induced.

Making basic rules is easy, but it's complex if you want to do something a little more nuanced. I've been unable to make some rules that I wanted. I couldn't evaluate some values or parameters of the components I look for. I haven't always been able to assess them.

It feels like some attributes of resources can't be interrogated through the GSL the way I would like. For example, I wanted to figure out all the systems launched with a particular image that had been running for 31 days or more. Until I talked to the Dome9 people and the support team, I didn't understand how to frame that query in GSL. The support team told me how to do it, but I couldn't figure it out alone. The documentation is a little unclear about how to do some of those configurations. More tutorials and examples on the blogs and support pages would be helpful. 

I had another problem when we tried to encrypt all of our storage volumes. There is a feature called batch jobs or Elastic MapReduce jobs. CloudGuard sometimes can't detect the encryption status of the underlying disks of those systems that process my workloads. It pops up with a bunch of alerts that say, "Non-encrypted volumes have been found in your account." 

Those jobs are dynamic, so they spin up, run for an hour or two, and all the systems are destroyed. By the time I checked it, all the systems were gone. CloudGuard threw a bunch of alerts in the middle of the night when all these things happened, and I went back to evaluate the configuration. I know they were all encrypted because I can see how it was deployed. It didn't have a great insight into my actual workload, but it generally tells me when people launch unencrypted things. It isn't perfect, but it's okay.

I have used CloudGuard for three years.

CloudGuard has been solidly stable. I'd say nearly perfect.

CloudGuard's scalability is decent. They're switching to a new onboarding methodology that I'm not in love with, but I think we'll find a way to make it work and continue to scale. It has been good.

I rate Check Point's support an eight out of ten. I've contacted them with a few questions or issues and always had good support experiences with them. I'm not a huge customer paying millions of dollars a year. I work for a small startup on the bleeding edge of technology, and I feel like Check Point and Dome9 meet me where I am. 

It wasn't trying to shove a network firewall, like a data center security tool, down my throat. Palo Alto and Check Point are old-school network security appliance vendors that are out of their depth in cloud security, so they bought tools like bought Twistlock and Dome9. Check Point's acquisition and management of Dome9 have been excellent. I can still talk to people at Dome9 and get support for this tooling, but it has been difficult for me to do that with their competitors. 

Positive

I've used Palo Alto Prisma Cloud, but I've also used Palo Alto's Cloud Security Posture Management tooling. I prefer Check Point, which is why we have it.

I still have both solutions, but I use Palo Alto for something else. I use Twistlock, a Prisma Cloud module, for runtime protection of containerized workloads. I also use Dome9 for CSPM. I did not like using Prisma Cloud for CSPM because I did not care for the rule language or configuration. 

Also, I feel like Check Point, and Dome9 listen to their users. If I'm dying for a new feature to improve the solution, they would hear me out and consider it. I guarantee you that Palo Alto doesn't care.

Deploying CloudGuard is straightforward. I deployed it and configured the auto-remediation alone, but I also worked with another architect to discuss the design and workshop some ideas, so we could say a team of two deployed it.
After deployment, maintenance has been very low.

We've seen a return. It still makes sense to write a check. I can't imagine going back to doing it the way I did before. It's essential for my compliance program to have this tool in place. If I could save the $100,000 or more I pay annually and use cloud-native tools, the additional time I would spend tuning and doing everything I'm doing with CloudGuard wouldn't be worth it, at least not in the first year. 

CloudGuard is fairly priced.

I rate Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management an eight out of ten. I advise new users to start with a defined list of goals or problems and implement the solution in a way that initially prioritizes their most significant issues or primary goals. Don't try to boil the ocean. In other words, don't enable all the features and do everything at once. They will be overloaded unless they know what they're doing. Go feature by feature, function by function, and area by area. Determine where your critical risks are and implement the solution based on that knowledge.

I think there are some benefits to using a third-party tool. For example, these tools might simplify and enrich features or offer focus. You're adding another view or pane of glass to your security world, but once you start to look across clouds, it becomes interesting. I have to write all my own rules for Azure and AWS. At the same time, I can get the same report delivered to my inbox that I can then feed to my executives, showing them the health of these cloud properties. 

It looks cohesive and coherent instead of using separate native tools for AWS, GCP, Alibaba, and Azure and trying to compile all those reports and metrics. At least I can distill my posture into a commonsense readable score and transmit that to the executives. I can tell them, "Our posture's at 98% compliance." They can comprehend that and compare the scores from week to week. It helps me from a reporting angle.

We use CloudGuard to monitor the cloud IaaS, AWS, and Azure security postures, including cloud assets' configurations. Based on the framework in the rulesets, it will give us failing, passing, or partially compliant scores. It allows us to implement auto-remediation and guardrails. 

If a user exposes storage on the public internet accidentally or purposefully, a daily report is sent to the account owner. CloudGuard will automatically fix the issue if auto-remediation is appropriate. We have GCP, AWS, and Azure accounts. CloudGuard is a SaaS solution, and we onboard all our AWS accounts, whether public, private, or hybrid.

In our sandbox environment, auto-remediation kicks in, and everything is fixed. Users try to do it themselves but often don't know how because they're not trained to provide cloud support. We don't currently use complete remediation, which will break their production environment, but we're getting better by nagging the cloud account users. Our cybersecurity team can use the shared response score to encourage cloud account owners to fix the problem.

CloudGuard has specific instructions for how users should fix issues, but it's like pulling teeth sometimes. Users often don't respond, and we get to the point where we need to tell them that it's going through change management and we can't renew it. We will auto-remediate in production environments if they don't respond by that date. 

It helped some cloud deployment users understand how to improve security posture, but not all of them. It depends on whether they are reading the CloudGuard reports daily. Many don't want to manage that part, and we believe our cybersecurity will help fix that for them.

We automated account onboarding. When a user wants a new cloud account, the automation scripts kick in after the request is approved to create the cloud account. After the provisioning is completed, the account is onboarded into CloudGuard. It enables us to have full coverage because CloudGuard monitors all our organization's cloud accounts.

I wouldn't say that CloudGuard has freed up staff for other projects. I have two or three dedicated SecOps people to monitor and follow up with remediation when auto-remediation isn't possible. We also deal with CloudGuard account requests and just-in-time user account access. It's difficult to assign a specific user to view the cloud accounts only they can see. 

I'm an SME for the product and train people annually because SecOps folks come and go. So far, we have had this software for three years. A lot of other organizations will switch solutions after two or three years. Training is essential because it's a high learning curve for people unfamiliar with the cloud. I don't think CloudGuard has made it more accessible. While it has decreased the resources, we still need at least one full-time admin dealing with CloudGuard, especially with the bugs.

We saved some time. We always go for a Unified Enterprise Platform. In terms of Cloud Security Posture Management, we wanted an enterprise solution with GCP, AWS, and Azure support, so we chose CloudGuard.

The posture management and remediation features are the most valuable. We use GSL Builder to build custom rules in alignment with our organization's policies. CloudGuard has canned rules using multiple standard frameworks, but we also have additional rules. Building custom rules with GSL Builder is medium difficulty. They have several examples of other compliance rules you can use. The GSL documentation is decent. A non-technical person can learn to use GSL Builder in about a week. GSL Builder saved us time and reduced human error. 

The auto-remediation works when it works. It does its job and is based on the rule instead of the alert's severity. In our company, we say, "Okay, this rule is a high severity. We don't want the data to be exposed on the internet." For example, if someone puts a public IP on our database, we will set a rule to shut it down immediately. That's how we define remediation. 

It isn't based on the severity or the level of work. Some rules may be defined as lower severity by default, but they might be higher depending on the organization's policy. It kicks in when there's an alert matching the remediation rule. The effectiveness of the remediation is 50%. Some of their bots used to fix issues automatically need to be updated. We had to make a few custom changes to some bots because they don't wake up.

CloudGuard's effective risk management only scans accounts every hour. We have more than 150 AWS accounts and 20 Azure accounts. We sent Check Point a request asking them to increase the frequency to five to fifteen minutes. I want the flexibility to scan it as often as possible based on the account's importance. That part is lacking. 

When rules change, it messes up the remediation. They haven't found a fix for that yet. The remediation rule goes into limbo. It's an architectural design flaw within their end compliance engine—a serious bug. We must spend extra time reapplying the rule when they periodically update the compliance presets. Auto-remediation breaks if you're using that particular out-of-the-box rule. I haven't experienced this recently, so maybe they fixed that part. However, that's what it did in the past.

Check Point is slow to respond to bugs. They resolve bugs maybe once every two weeks, and their R&D is slow. They're in Israel, and it's not just the Israeli holidays. I would probably pick a large US company if we did this over again. 

They don't give us continuous feedback. I want live feedback when they change something. Stop breaking things. The company should let us know what they're doing when they add new features. They don't have an official beta program, so you can't test the new features. 

That's the other bad thing about this product, but I don't know about other Check Point products. They're a firewall company but not a software company. If you put out a beta, customers should have the option to test it and give feedback. I've been putting a lot of work into CloudGuard to fix all the bugs. They should have paid me to fix their bugs for them.

They need to decrease their bug resolution time. Anything longer than two weeks is problematic. It's why we don't jump into the deep end with all these other features they've added. Our primary feature is the CSPM cloud part. The solution is useless if the reporting or remediation breaks, as it has in the past. It requires an SME for CloudGuard to dig in deeper, which takes time away from our SecOps folks.

We've been using CloudGuard for three years.

CloudGuard is pretty stable.

CloudGuard is scalable. I don't need to worry about it.

I rate Check Point's support a seven out of ten. They respond within a day. 

Neutral

Setting up CloudGuard is straightforward, and it takes a few days. We handled the deployment in-house with two full-time employees. It's a SaaS solution, so the only maintenance required is backups. 

We implemented this solution in-house.

The pricing of CloudGuard increases annually, and we don't see the value because we don't use all the features. We're primarily using CSPM and maybe Workload Protection. We did the Kubernetes part and used Network Explorer as a one-off. We only used Network Explorer for diagnostics. 

We use the Intelligence module for CSPM but don't analyze network traffic with CloudGuard. It's an expensive subscription, so we don't use the intelligence part.

We evaluated Palo Alto Prisma Cloud and Twistlock. Back then, the solution was owned by an independent company called Dome9, and Check Point acquired them. It had the best rule set out there. We chose it because it had all the rule sets out of the box and supported GCP, Azure, and AWS. 

I rate Check Point CloudGard Posture Management a seven out of ten. CloudGuard does its job, but the remediation is not perfect. Other CSPM tools do a better job of using remediation exclusion rules, especially scanning and putting out reports at a custom frequency versus every hour.

If the price isn't an issue and you don't care about using all the features, it's an okay product for enterprises to use to cover all cloud IaaS. If you're thinking about implementing CloudGuard, you should consider two things. First, the price is marked up every year by 10-plus percent, whether you use a particular feature or not. It's an annual subscription model, so you can always cancel at any time. 

Second, you should think about the modules. Workload Protection is okay if you use Kubernetes. You can use intelligence if you need to analyze traffic within your cloud environment for regulation-specific reasons, but it will cost you extra. CloudGuard's strong suit is that they support a lot of the features and AWS cloud assets.

Dome9 is a SaaS security solution that handles compliance and security for cloud.

There are two major functions, and the first is to operate as a central firewall monitoring and management system in the cloud. We have more than 100 firewalls in the cloud, and Dome9 allows us to manage them.

The second function is its role as a compliance suite that helps you in keeping your cloud platforms compliant with PCI or ISO 27001.

For the most part, this is what I used it for. In the beginning, Dome9 did not have many features. There were only these two.

Using Dome9, I was able to manage a multi-cloud platform based on AWS, Azure, and Google for a multinational company in Europe with only three engineers.

Dome9 enables customizable governance using simple, readable language. The biggest advantage is that when there are things to be changed because of compliance problems, the engineers receive a plain-language text that instructs them on what to do. This also means that you don't have to have as many cloud specialists available.

The two most valuable features for us are the central firewall administrator and the real-time cloud compliance monitoring. The vendor has been building on these features, but they are the two that are most important for us.

With respect to how the compliance frameworks affect our security and compliance operations, it is important to consider that first of all, in the cloud, anybody can change a firewall. We wanted to have a central firewall administrator, with our more than 100 firewalls, so that we could make sure that our platform would stay secure. Dome9 alerts if somebody replaces something and puts it back, which is the biggest feature that we wanted.

Then, as an added feature, they have a real-time audit platform where you constantly have audits of your clouds to see that engineers don't forget to put all of the compliance in place.

Dome9's accuracy when it comes to compliance checking is very good, and it is done in real-time. I would rate it a nine out of ten. It is not perfect because sometimes you have false positives, although I don't think that you can get rid of them entirely. Overall, for compliance and diverse compliance methodologies, I would rate it a nine.

On the topic of accuracy, I would rate remediation a nine out of ten as well. It is easy to do because it is written in plain language, and also because there is a manual on how to remediate.

The false positives can be annoying at times.

We have been using Dome9 for five years.

My experience with Dome9 began about five and a half years ago when I was working with a company that was building a multi-cloud platform. I was one of the first customers for Dome9, before the Check Point acquisition, and I was using it to manage my multi-cloud platform.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. It has always worked and I've never had a bad thing happen with it. In the beginning, when they introduced new features during beta testing, there were issues. However, it was always stable.

Dome9 is a SaaS solution, so it scales with your cloud. When you get hundreds of firewalls, perhaps 200 or 300 of one, then the complexity becomes the same in Dome9 as the thing that you want to solve in the cloud, so I don't think that they can extend to that.

I have a deployment that is European-wide, multi-cloud, with approximately 480 virtual machines. There were a lot of other components as well, so it was a really huge use case.

The technical support from Dome9 is really good. In fact, for me at the time, it was really good because I had direct access to the American team, so I just had to call if there was an issue. I also had monthly meetings with them to discuss things to improve and see if their service was okay for us.

Positive

Initially, we used another solution but that was not for firewall security. Rather, it was for compliance.

The initial setup is really easy. Just submit the cloud key. It takes between an hour and two hours to deploy. When I installed it, the process did not take longer than an hour.

My implementation strategy fits into the way I design secure private clouds or multi-clouds, based on public cloud providers. It's almost a necessity. You can do it in other ways by using the local ACLs, etc, but then it becomes cumbersome. Dome9 takes a lot of the work out of it and gives you a single point to manage all of your security firewalls.

I deployed Dome9 myself. In my previous role, I was the head of cloud development and I directed two out of the three engineers in the team.

In the beginning, the price of Dome9 was cheap, whereas now it is not.

I haven't gotten the latest pricing, but my advice is that you need to balance it out with your cloud business cases. It all depends on how many machines, servers, and the size of the cloud that you have. It's probably not useful if you have only a few machines and some network security groups to manage them. In this case, it's not something that you need.

I did evaluate another tool initially. I cannot recall the name but it had ".io" after it. Ultimately, we decided not to use it because it only had the compliance component and it was more expensive.

The native cloud security controls provided by the cloud vendors, when it comes to features like transparency and customization, are very weak. That's why you need Dome9. On their own, I would rate the native cloud security controls a four out of ten. They are complex, and the biggest issue is that it's difficult to secure if you want to centralize your security operation.

When maintaining and scaling security services and configurations across multiple public clouds using Dome9, versus using native cloud security controls, I find that it is much better. It's the same interface in Dome9, regardless of the cloud. Of course, your firewall administrator still needs to have knowledge of what he's doing. That doesn't change. The important point is that the interface is much better and it doesn't change between cloud environments.

I would rate the accuracy of the security visibility slightly lower than nine out of ten because it's still complex to do, even with Dome9. The biggest feature of Dome9 is that it rolls back the changes when somebody has changed it in the cloud without authorization, yet the complexity of managing a lot of firewalls is still there. I would rate the accuracy of security visibility a seven and a half or eight out of ten.

I would rate the solution's comprehensiveness for cloud compliance and governance an eight out of ten. The false positives are a little bit annoying at times.

Dome9 helps to minimize the attack surface and manage dynamic access, although I didn't use the dynamic access in my setup. For my use case, it was primarily minimizing the internal attack surface because I didn't use it for external connections. I had a different role there. When you only have three engineers, you need to trust them. The reason that we used Dome9 was to be able to do it with a few engineers.

Dome9 provides a unified security solution across AWS, Azure, and Google, but not for anything else. To that end, I don't think that any other cloud provider would be a market contender at this point, and Google will probably even disappear after a while.

My advice for anybody who is considering Dome9 is to try it. If you're looking to manage a large security defense platform, in-depth, with a lot of firewalls, try it and you'll be surprised.

One of the things that I learned from using Dome9 was that it offered support for compliance. I was originally just looking for a way to manage all of these firewalls, and that came as a pleasant surprise. It helped us a lot with our ISO 27000 and PCI certification.

Overall, in terms of functionality, Dome9 is fairly well made.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The product provides complete visibility of our cloud security posture. It supports servers and Cloud-Native Services. It provides a centralized solution for Cloud Security with risk and compliance management. 

We required it to manage various compliance requirements including live ISO, SOC, PCI and it supports everything. Our Organization is in a hybrid structure and in it, we are using various AWS and Azure accounts. Earlier, we managed everything individually, however, after the implementation of it, we now manage everything from a single solution. The single solution helps with the system, network, and security administration.

The solution provides the complete visibility of Cloud Security, as well as a number of baseline policies and rules. This helps us to manage cloud posture with less effort. After implementation, it reduced administrative effort in terms of managed security over the cloud. Now, we are not dependent on individual tools for each account as well as cloud service providers. 

After implementation, the team can generate reports from a single console for all compliance needs.

Auto Remediation is a very effective feature and it improves the need for manual intervention from the security and cloud administrator.

The baseline policy and the integration with the public cloud are very easy.

The number of compliance rulesets along with the baseline policy, support of cloud-native services, and license management are easy. Support of the CI/CD pipeline security (Code Security), Kubernetes, et cetera, is useful. 

There are very helpful and various types of reports. Reporting features are very good and anyone from the compliance team can view/generate a report according to compliance support.

Auto remediation is a very effective feature that helps ensure less manual intervention.

Support of AWS Lamda and Azure Functions helps for any potential breaches.

Almost all features are good, however, they still require improvements to the code security portion on which integration with the major source code repository is required.

Integration with CI/CD is an important aspect as it is needed to secure the environment. Having it will help a lot.

Integration with Docker is also a key feature that needs some improvements.

Integration with other third parties and with SIEM is an important aspect that should be addressed.

Currently, it provides integration with Tenable, but it would be good if it had support other VAPT software as well.

We have been using Check Point CloudGuard Posture management for the last 8+ months.

The solution is very stable and we have not found any gaps. It provides seamless integration with the public cloud.

It's a highly scalable solution and integration with the public cloud is very good. The way you can centralize the dashboard of entire cloud infra is a very impressive.

Support has been good. We implement it with the help of OEM support and whenever we've required help we've received a good response.

Earlier, we tested other tools as well, however, the features which were available via Check Point are very good and the future roadmap is also very good in regards to cloud security.

The setup is straightforward and seamless.

We implemented it with help of Check Point support. The rest was managed by our internal team as it's easy to handle.

Security is very important and gives us ROI from security itself. We also get an ROI as we have less administrative effort. We can see an ROI with the compliance and risk management on offer too.

The setup cost is very affordable and very easy. Integration with the public cloud is very easy. The licensing calculation is also very good and no manual effort is required.

We evaluated other tools like Rapid7, Qualys, and AWS native security tools, as well as Azure native security tools.

It's a very strong solution for cloud security posture management and very effective for large and mid-size environments. Any organization moving towards the cloud would benefit from this.  

We pull all of our cloud platforms into Microsoft Azure. We needed a tool that would provide us with provides policy compliance to be able to monitor our environment. In the case something is in violation of one of those rules, it will let us know and we can correct it. 

It is also very flexible to configure users, and authentication methods and thus be able to control the activities of each of the system administrators and users, another one of the functionalities it presents is that it allows us to monitor the records of our environment in the Azure Cloud and be able to take the necessary measures if there is a problem.

One of the reasons we were able to implement this solution is that it gives us complete visibility into the workload that we have hosted on our Microsoft Azure platform. This tool came to help improve our security environment in the cloud and provide more detail through reports such as compliance and security, as it shows us complete visibility of the traffic that is flowing to our Azure platform.

Another reason we implemented it and it caught our attention was the access control to our Azure cloud. Every time a policy is created for each purpose, it immediately blocks the access for which it was designed. Dome9 provides excellent visibility.

Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management presents great values, such as the IAM role control, since if it does not meet the established parameters, these controls will not allow the creation of users, and policies that are not allowed.

It presents great visibility of the traffic flow of our cloud, providing information on what data and users are circulating and in the event of a threat, it immediately identifies them by providing detailed and granular information from our entire environment. 

It also has and provides the ability to provide recommendations of the errors that exist and thus be able to correct them as soon as possible

The service is very complete for the functionality that it was created for, however, they can make a couple of improvements such as the validation of policies that must be available before they are implemented in the production environment. It should have some options to activate API calls to the platform in the cloud, another improvement would be that when the rules are colonized and they want to be published. They do not update as they should and the new rules are not applied. They can also try to reduce the false positives generated by the tool.

This solution has been used for approximately four years in the company.

One of the reasons why we chose to do the implementation with Check Point was its stability. Its performance is very good.

My impression was that the scalability was very good. It is a super scalable product.

On some occasions, we have had problems as they do not send the meetings on time or it takes a long time to resolve a case. However, on other occasions, they resolve very quickly.

Positive

Check Point was always our first option as many security teams are from Check Point.

The configuration was very simple. The application is a very user-friendly tool - apart from training and courses for implementation.

A Check Point engineer who had a lot of experience helped us with the implementation.

When making an investment with these tools you are taking care of an important patrimony that will double your profits.

Check Point always manages good prices and costs in the tools they sell.

We do not evaluate other options. We wanted to continue implementing the same brand since the other products have helped us a lot in the security of our company.

Users can fully rely on Check Point products as they are robustly designed for security.

Most of the infrastructure we have is in the Azure cloud. We have another on-premise. Since we were migrating to a cloud infrastructure, we needed a tool that would provide a certain degree of policy compliance and security throughout the environment and thus be able to have the monitored environment and out of vulnerabilities. 

With this tool, we can add different authentication methods to our systems, have a record of where they connect from, and cover all vulnerable security points, providing complete security.

The Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management tool has many innovative features.

One of those features is the access control that it provides and is unified against tools.

The control logs offer detailed reports of what happens within the infrastructure.

In addition to that, it provides clear broad visibility of all the workloads that are flowing within the Microsoft Azure platform, both in the cloud and on-premise. This helped us a lot to unify all security and have everything centralized.

Check Point CloudGuard Posture, in addition to having great security features, has IAM role management. This is very good for avoiding new roles in the administration panel or the system in general. Another point to note is that the tool has all the details provided by the security offered by the client and you can be sure that the investment you made is protecting the organization's perimeter security very well. It provides recommendations on how to attack the detected vulnerabilities.

The Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management tool is very good. In addition, the Check Point team works to give updates to the system regularly, and we have made several updates in recent years. 

We should be able to migrate the policies more fluidly. They should improve the technical support they provide there and should pay more attention to their customers since we have already had several problems where the resolution was not fast and efficient.

This solution has been used for approximately four years in the company.

One of the reasons why we chose to do the implementation with Check Point was based on its overall stability. The performance is very good.

My impression of the scalability is very good. It is a super scalable product in the area of security and remains very robust.

On some occasions, we have had problems with support. They do not send the meetings on time, or it takes a long time to resolve a case. That said, on other occasions, they have resolved issues very quickly.

Positive

Check Point was always our first option with this type of solution since many security teams are from Check Point.

The configuration during setup was very simple. The application is very user-friendly. There are also training and courses for implementation.

A Check Point engineer with a lot of experience helped us with the implementation.

Of primary importance to any company is the security of the computer platforms; when making an investment with these tools, you are taking care of an important aspect of your business that can protect or even increase your profits.

The prices are competitive. You also have to see the characteristics that Check Point provides; it meets the expectations very well.

We did not evaluate other options as we wanted to continue implementing the same brand. Other products from Check Point have helped us a lot in the security of our company.

Users can fully rely on Check Point products as they are robustly designed for security.

It is a good tool for a large enterprise operating across multiple cloud environments, like AWS, Azure, or a hybrid infrastructure. Check Point posture management gives you visibility across your entire cloud infrastructure, so it helps you with management, maintenance, and compliance. With visibility across all these cloud platforms, you can protect against compromised credentials or identity theft. 

The assessment history lets you test each environment for each rule you set. You can see if the security tests have passed or failed, then plan a roadmap ahead on how to strengthen your security to defend against attacks on your cloud environment.

I would be great to have additional features when it comes to vulnerability assessments in terms of how the solution discovers vulnerabilities or compromised workloads and not just on security configurations with customizable reports would be nice. 

I'm a system integrator and a managed service provider. I've been using CloudGuard for a couple of years.

So far it works and we've had no major issues with stability. When it comes to managing clouds or gaining visibility, generating, or scanning different cloud environments, it meets all the requirements, especially if you're going through a specific compliance audit.

When it comes to scaling up, it's very easy to just add licenses. But to prior implementing this solution, you need to have a good accounting of all your assets to onboard on this platform. CloudGuard is good for bigger, more complex cloud infrastructures. But if you have only one cloud infrastructure, I don't think you will see much advantage over other cloud posture management. That's why this is useful mainly for bigger enterprises with multiple cloud instances and different cloud environment providers. 

So far, they've met all the service-level agreements (SLAs) with no delay. When it comes to Check Point, they have local distributors to provide level one or level two support. For level two or level three, it will go directly to the Check Point support. And I think that's how their SLAs work. The first line of their support should be local. If it cannot be handled locally, it goes global Check Point support. 

Setup is usually simple. It's not hard to implement it and gain visibility across two or more cloud infrastructures. It's quite fast. As long as you have the right number of assets, workloads, and applications for each cloud environment, you can easily deploy CloudGuard.

In terms of pricing, it's in the middle but more on the high side. It's not steep. However, I think the price is right for its functionality and the value you get from it when you're managing multiple clouds. It solves a lot of your compliance problems.

The licensing model is based on the size of your cloud infrastructure. So to estimate what you will pay, you need to count each and every asset. And when I say assets, that means every application, database, server, or virtual network on your cloud infrastructure. 

I'd like to see more flexibility in their licensing model. It's based on assets, but we all know that assets keep on growing. I would recommend a flexible, upgradeable license, so when you add assets, they can easily bill you or upgrade you.

I rate CloudGuard a nine out of 10.

I recommend CloudGuard posture management for anyone who needs to take control of multiple cloud environments. It streamlines visibility, so this is the right tool if you are trying to meet a specific compliance standard or you're managing hundreds or thousands of servers within your cloud environment. It unifies your cloud environment. 

We primarily use this solution for:

1. Visibility for cloud workloads; server, serverless & Kubernetes
2. Security configuration review along with auto-remediation
3. Posture management and compliance for the complete cloud environment
4. Centralize visibility for the complete cloud environment hosted on multiple cloud platforms (AWS, Azure)
5. The baseline for security policy as per workload based on services such as S3, EC2, etc
   
6. Visibility of API calls within the environment
7. IAM management providing access to the cloud network in a controlled manner
8. Alert and notification for any security breach or changes in the cloud environment
   
9. Flow visibility of traffic from and to the cloud environment
   
10. Cloud availability within India

This solution has improved our organization in several ways, including:

1. It provides complete visibility of workload hosted on different cloud platforms including AWS and Azure, along with multiple tenants.
2. Helped in enhancing security for our cloud environment by providing reports both in terms of security and compliance.
3. Provides complete visibility of traffic flowing from/towards the cloud platform.
4. Provides best practice policy, which helps to strengthen the security of our workloads.
5. Asset inventory and API calls happening from the cloud.
6. Provides control in terms of accessing our cloud workloads. A policy has been created that will block direct access to the cloud environment in case the same is not defined or approved in Dome9

The most valuable features of this product are:

1. IAM Role gives complete control over the cloud environment. In case someone tries to bypass and create a user or policy locally, which is not allowed or defined in Dome9, the changes will be rolled back and a notification will be sent to the concerned team.
2. It is always on and even available on a mobile device using the app.
3. Provides complete visibility of traffic flow with threat intel provided from Check Point. It even provides communication details for any suspicious IP.
   
4. Provides detailed information if a workload is allowed direct access, bypassing any firewall policy.
5. Provides a granular level of reports, along with issues based on compliance. The standard is defined, depending upon organizational requirements.
6. Task delegation, as a particular incident can be assigned to a particular individual, and the same can be done manually or in an automated fashion.
7. Customize queries for detecting any type of incident.

There are several things in need of improvement, including:

1. Policy validation should be available before it is deployed in a production environment using a cloud template.
2. Auto remediation requires read/write access. As providing read/write access to third-party applications can add risk, it should have some option of triggering API calls to the cloud platform, which in turn makes the required changes.
3. A number of security rules need to be added in order to identify more issues.
4. Reporting should have more options.
5. It should support all container platforms for visibility of complete infrastructure using a single console such as PCF .
   

I have been using Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management for three months.

Initially, we were using tools provided by the service provider. These included Scout Suite, AWS Config, AWS Trusted Advisor, and Amazon GuardDuty. These are monitoring tools, and we used similar tools for Azure as well. We needed to go through different consoles to identify any incident, which was not convenient.

Licensing and costs are straightforward, as they have a baseline of 100 workloads within one license and no additional charges.

Also, it does not have any impact on cloud billing because the data is shared using API calls, which is well within the limit of free API calls.

The complete solution should be provided in a single license including storage, as Check Point charges extra for logic.

We evaluated RedLock from Prisma (Palo Alto) and Conformity (Trend Micro).