Check Point Harmony Endpoint Reviews

We have used Check Point Sandblast Agent as an anti-malware solution. We were already working in a Check Point environment, which made the decision to purchase an endpoint security product from Check Point easy.

We first tested it in a Lab environment, where we sampled various malware, some less complicated than others. We were impressed with the results.

Check Point Endpoint Security really helped the business stop various malware attacks throughout the time we used it, including a ransomware attack, which was stopped in minutes.

The Sandblast Agent really made a difference for the organization. It integrated well with the existing Check Point environment we had in place. It was used both for threat protection and remote access VPN.

I think some work needs to be done to improve the integration with other third-party products, namely SIEM solutions. We found it quite challenging.

We found out the hard way that the configuration was lost when we version upgraded the management console.

We have used Check Point Endpoint Security for the past two years.

We did not use another similar solution prior to this one.

We did not evaluate other options.

We are using Check Point Endpoint security to protect our remote users, as well as our roaming users that are accessing our on-premises resources externally.

We have come to know that our remote and roaming users are completely secure with Check Point Endpoint Security. With this confidence, we are now planning to roll out this solution for our on-premises resources, including machines and devices, as well. This will give us complete endpoint security.

Check Point Endpoint Security has improved our organization with features that include Security, Management, and Reporting. We have not yet rolled it out for all users, but that is our intention.

With this product, the data accessible by our endpoints is secure.

We have zero-day protection, which is not available with our other endpoint protection solution. That is the reason we preferred to implement Check Point Endpoint Security.

Finally, from a management perspective, the single point of control makes it more manageable.

The most valuable feature is the Zero-day protection, which covers our on-premises users, and well as those users who are outside of our network. 

With Zero-day protection, we have complied with our customer-specific policies as well.

Most of our users are working on customer-related projects and today, everybody is looking to have zero-day protection at the endpoint level, as well as to protect against unknown threats or viruses.

As of now, product-wise, we haven't found any major concern that needs to improve, although it does not support full MDM and this is something that should be there.

We have been using Check Point Endpoint Security for the last six months.

Scalability is very good and there is no such concern for this solution.

The cost is huge compared to other products that are available on market.

We haven't evaluated other products but we know there are many that are cheaper than Check Point.

In my opinion, it is a very good solution for organizations with a complex environment. We can secure it. From a security perspective, we trust only Check Point endpoint security. This product is a market leader.

With every new firewall that we're purchasing, we're deploying the SandBlast Agent. At the moment we're only running it on about 20 firewalls, just because the licensing isn't retroactive. What we need to do is produce a proof of concept to say, "This is the stuff we're getting." We're looking at it in a learning mode and then we can consider getting into a more aggressive mode of stopping everything. At the moment, we're trying to use it to give us information rather than to fully stop everything.

It's deployed on our physical firewalls, on-prem.

We have seen some attempted ransomware in our network. With the firewall we've already got IPS, but we wanted to integrate the endpoints into that as well. That's something we are seeing. Our IT risk team are getting those reports and seeing them and seeing fewer potential attacks.

It reduces potential downtime through ransomware by reducing risk. I don't think I would go to the CEO and say, "Hey, we've completely eradicated this and that," but it certainly complements other Check Point products that we have. It gives us some more information about what is happening and where it's happening on the network, on-prem, on the applicable firewalls. It's hard to say exactly what it has improved because it just works very well with what we've got. Certainly, with our Windows environment and our VPN, we do see a lot more. But I don't know if there's just more of a focus on the reporting, as a whole, that we're getting.

We have had previous ransomware attacks, and while we can't necessarily quantify any downtime or loss, there certainly was risk around that. This has reduced our risk in that environment. That's one of the big focal points. From a network operational point of view, could you ask, "Well, has it reduced things?" and the answer is "no," but from an IT-risk point of view, our IT risk team have certainly seen less impact from attacks. We're more proactive than reactive, compared to how we were doing things before.

We don't see it leading to a reduced number of security engineers. What we do envisage is information and empowerment. Rather than manually having to check this, that, and the other, we're looking at having these tools available and for them to produce actual results. We definitely see this tool helping us do that.

It's pretty complete for preventing threats to endpoints. Its capabilities are great.

The solution's automated detection and response capabilities are pretty good. It really depends on how aggressive we want to be with it. We've not deployed it in the most aggressive way you can, such as shutting down everything, because we've not deployed it in a greenfield site. It has not been deployed with that in mind. It has been deployed as an add-on service. As such, we don't want to be as aggressive as some top security firms would recommend we should be.

We do like the product, although there are quite a few things that we're asking our Check Point account team to enhance, where we think we probably could get more features from it.

We use a couple of Check Point products, like SmartEvent, and SandBlast Agent is not really integrated into that. We haven't gotten the reports working yet. We are working with the account team and trying. As I said, it's still relatively new in terms of what we're trying to achieve. We probably should have had more Professional Services come and help us. But, from our company's point of view, especially at this time in the market, the finances are just not there. But from what I've seen so far, I don't think there's enough integration into SmartEvent. That's something that I've asked our account team to try to focus on in the next versions or as an enhancement request.

Integration and deployment are probably the weakest points, and maybe service as well, although they are still at the high end. Would we go out to market and buy this on its own? Probably not, is the honest answer. But because it is a Check Point product and the licensing comes as part of it, it gives us this time to go and prove that, when it's together with all the other products that we have from Check Point, it certainly integrates very well. Would I go and buy this just as a standalone service if we didn't have Check Point firewalls? Probably not.

We're relatively new to Check Point SandBlast Agent, once they put it onto their firewall platform with the new environment. It comes built-in for the first year, including the cost. We've sampled it, starting about four months ago.

We had seen it work before. We had demos with it, but it was always something that seemed would be a nice feature to use, but not something the business wanted to buy into, per se. Now that it comes as part of the package for the first year, we thought we'd give it a go and see how it gets on.

I've had no problems from a stability point of view. It just seems to work.

It's definitely scalable. It's whether there is a business appetite. When we get a new firewall, we'll enable it and run it through the service. It's scalable to retrofit. We could do that and we could run that very easily, but that would involve a commercial spend, which at the moment, no one wants to do. We understand that, but the solution is certainly something that is of interest to various people.

If we get approval then it will move from a PoC to across-the-board. At that point, there would be between 100 and 200 people using it and thousands of agents. It could be scaled out to our whole organization. Again, it's funding-dependent.

We have Diamond Support, so it's very good, but we pay for the privilege. We have one engineer and a separate TAC team.

We had a solution but it wasn't really a similar solution. This is the first of its kind for us, for what it does. We do have antiviruses, so that the machines aren't just dead, and we do have our own hybrid package of something that, if you add four of them together, maybe adds up to half of this, but no similar package.

It's relatively easy to set up. There's plenty of documentation out there for how you do it. The way we've done it is probably the easiest way of doing it. We're not going all-out. We've gone with a small approach, mainly due to commercial reasons.

Our implementation strategy is just to switch it on in our new firewalls and see what happens, honestly. That's not always the best approach, but we switch it on in learning mode to give us information on what's out there and to see what we didn't know.

It took us about three weeks with the first two firewalls, and that doesn't include the firewall build time. That's just setting up everything else and the integration piece. There were two of us involved, me and a colleague. There were "dotted lines" into others, such as our IT risk team where we were asking, "Hey, is this what you want to see?" We're not really offering it as a full service, it's a PoC. If it goes live with a view to deploy it to all of our firewalls and all of our endpoints, I wouldn't say we would need any more people. It would be part of our operational team. The same is true for the risk team. I don't think we would need to get more people, although we see the IT risk team having more of an input.

We did it ourselves.  Potentially, if I had an open wallet and a blank cheque book, would we use a third-party? Yes, of course we would, but at the moment that option is just not there.

Return on investment would be not being attacked. Have we seen any? No. Has it identified certain things? Yes. The way we've got to look at return on investment is, all of a sudden we're less vulnerable to attacks. That's a hard measurement to define. Ultimately, not being attacked, and our reputation, is worth a lot more than just a dollar figure.

The cost-effectiveness of SandBlast is knowledge and understanding what is happening on our network. Do we have some infections? Are we seeing certain things which, without this tool, we would be exposed to? Yes, we are seeing that.

Licensing comes free in that first year or is included in the base package. From a commercial point of view, it really just is the renewal cost, rather than a one-time fixed cost or buy-in. That's for new firewalls. For existing firewalls, we haven't even gotten to that point yet. They don't even want us to look at the pricing. First, we need to think about what the product does. Does it do what it says on the tin? And if it does, then it's a commercial thing. We have quite a good commercial model with Check Point, so we don't really need to worry about that too much. The pricing should be good.

The licensing, the way they've changed it, is a positive and a negative. Ultimately, Check Point has changed how it operates and now we have to go back and retrofit.

If this does everything it says it does, I don't see any reason that we would use a different product, because this integrates so well with existing Check Point products.

What we've gained is more of an understanding of what's on our network. If I were to go and do this again from scratch, I probably would have looked to integrate more with our Check Point sales team and would have gotten more help from them.

My advice would be to involve your SE. He can help you through a lot more of the options when you deploy.

We don't use the solution’s Management Platform for the creation of virtual endpoint management services in the cloud. We haven't got to that cloud point yet. It's something we could do, potentially. We're going to work with our account team about that. But that's the one of the lessons learned: We did it by just playing around with it rather than doing a full deployment.

I would rate it at nine out of 10. What comes to mind is its effectiveness. Normally, I don't get involved in the costing too much. Is it doing everything that it said it was going to do? Yes it is, at the moment. Could it be enhanced more? Sure. But we have a relationship with Check Point and they do deliver on the RFEs for us. If we say we want it to do this, they'll get their engineering team looking at that.

The platform is our anti-ransomware agent, where it helps us prevent any cyber-attack. We find it intuitive, as it unpacks files and decrypts any hidden malware, thus enabling us to work in a safe environment and keep our own data, as well as that of our customers, safe and secure.

Our work environment is the banking industry and on a daily basis, we handle lots of customer data. This makes us a potential target for malware attacks but with the platform in place, we are able to shun all of that.                       

The platform works on its own and it does not need to have an assigned employee to monitor how it's working, thus bringing efficiency into our company.

It fit well into our environment, allowing us to fight any attempt to corrupt computer resources.

The best thing is that it fits into all environments, which gives any organization a chance to use it intuitively without worrying about the nature of their industry.

Some of the less tech-savvy users sometimes find it difficult in adjusting and learning how to use the platform.

In some areas, the user-communities that ought to help are not readily available. Perhaps in the future, the vendor ought to send a sales representative or a knowledgeable person to each buyer to assess how they are using the platform. In case of any challenges, they should help them in using the platform efficiently.

I have been using Check Point SandBlast Agent for more than five years. 

This platform has been reliable, through and through, since we started using it.

The vendor offers reliable customer support services to users who may be stuck somewhere in using the platform. This ensures that one continues to receive stable services from the platform.

Our company works in the area of developing and delivering online gambling platforms. The Check Point Next-Generation Firewalls are the core security solution 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 Antivirus software blade is one of the numerous blades activated on the NGFWs and serves for security improvement in the area of scanning files that are traversing the network for the presence of viruses or other malicious software.

The Check Point HA Clusters are used to protect our company's datacenter, located in Asia (Taiwan). This software blade, the Check Point Antivirus, is activated in conjunction with the others and serves to scan the files traversing via the network. They may be in the form of email attachments or via HTTP/S.

Such files are scanned for the presence of known viruses and malware with the help of the built-in database. The database is updated as per schedule, which for us is four times per day.

The software is quite simple to use, yet still efficient. The antivirus scans are the basic security mechanism, which should be implemented on all the levels. In my opinion, the Check Point Antivirus does its job just right.

1. The Antivirus software blade is part of the Next Generation Threat Prevention license bundle.
   
2. The Antivirus is able to scan files downloaded from the internet or traversing the network via Check Point Gateways/Clusters.
3. The Antivirus software blade is configured via the Unified Threat Prevention policy in the Smart Console (at least for R80.10, the version we use).
4. There is almost no impact on the security Gateway/Cluster performance after the activation of the blade, especially if you don't scan nested archives.
5. The updates for the blade are downloaded every two hours.
6. As with the other Check Point blades, the visibility and logging of events are outstanding.

I think that the pricing for the Check Point products should be reconsidered, as we found it to be quite expensive to purchase and to maintain. Maintenance requires that the licenses and the support services be prolonged regularly.

Alternatively, they should create some additional bundles of the software blades with significant discounts in addition to the current Next Generation Threat Prevention & SandBlast (NGTX) and Next Generation Threat Prevention (NGTP) offers.

We also had several support cases opened for software issues, but none of them were connected with the Check Point Antivirus software blade.

We have been using this product for about three years, starting in late 2017.

The Check Point Antivirus software blade is stable and we haven't faced any issues with it.

The Check Point Antivirus software blade scales well with the gateways we use, since it doesn't affect the overall performance much after activation.

We have had several support cases opened, but none of them were connected with the Check Point Mobile Access Software Blade. Some of the issues were resolved by installing the latest recommended JumoHotfix, whereas some required additional configuration at the OS kernel level.

The longest issue took about one month to be resolved, which we consider too long.

No, we didn't previously use another network antivirus solution.

The setup was straightforward. The configuration was easy and understandable, and we relied heavily on built-in objects and groups.

Our deployment was completed by our in-house team. We have a Check Point Certified engineer working in the engineering team.

Choosing the correct set of licenses is essential because, without the additional software blade licenses, the Check Point gateways are just a stateful firewall.

No, since we had Check Point NGFWs implemented, we just enabled the new software blade.

Our primary use case for this solution is Antivirus capabilities. These include Antimalware, Antibot, Anti-Ransomware, and Threat Emulation and Anti Exploit. We have a mixed environment that includes Windows 2012 R2 Windows 7 Windows 10 and macOS 10.xx. We also use VMware. 

The client has been installed on all servers, PC,s, laptops and MAC machines. 

We need all this infrastructure monitored for malicious activity and reporting if something happens in realtime. This solution has worked very well.

In the past, we have experienced virus problems on our network. It has come in through email attachments, USB drives, internet websites, and so on. The current solution was not performing well. Since we implemented  Checkpoint Endpoint Security we have had no infection thus far. It is able to scan all email attachments, lock the ability to use external USB drives, and scan rouge internet traffic. We are very satisfied with this solution. Since its implementation, we have had no loss in data and no loss of revenue.

One of the most valuable features is the Threat Emulation and Threat Extraction. These features are able to scan email attachments before the user is able to access the file and then provide a safe copy of the attachment. Malicious files never get to the users' machine. This is a very valuable feature of this solution.

The Zero Phishing feature is also very valuable. This feature has the ability to scan the username and password fields on a website before you enter your credentials and verify if the site is legitimate. This brilliant feature prevents the stealing of account information.

As I understand there will be a URL filtering feature included with the browser agent in the future. This will allow URL filtering without the need for a Gateway Device. This is something I am looking forward to and would be a great addition to a list of features.

The best improvement to the product that can be made is to make it less resource-intensive so it may work effortlessly on slower systems.

The ability to push the Endpoint Client over the network without the use of 3rd party solutions would be an asset.

I have been using and implementing this solution for about three years.

My impression of the scalability of the this solution is positive. It can be don't with minimal affect on production. 

They attend to your needs in a timely manner. They are well educated in the product.

We did use a different solution in the past. It was not performing well and we were always getting infected by malicious software. they made us switch to Checkpoint Endpoint Security.

The initial setup is straightforward and can be done by less technical staff.

It was done by an in-house team.

Setup costs can be kept to a minimum as Check Point offers Cloud Management which eliminates the need for on-premise hardware cost.

We did evaluate Avast. Which was not performing well. We also evaluated Kaspersky. Their client was a bit to resource-intensive.

Check Point Endpoint Security just works. You will not be disappointed.

We use this solution for endpoint protection in our office.

In the tests that we have done, this solution is working okay. We were under an attack in our environment, and the Check Point response was good because we didn't lose anything.

The antivirus is not as friendly as other solutions and can be improved. 

We would like to have the ability to stop and restart the service remotely, which is something that we can do easily with Symantec but have a hard time with when using Check Point.

We have been using Check Point Endpoint Security for one and a half to two years.

We haven't had any issues with stability. It's okay.

I think that scalability is okay.

We have about 300 users.

I have spoken with Check Point technical support here in Portugal a couple of times. These were cases where I had a problem that the integrator could not quickly answer. They usually try to resolve things quickly.

In the past, I worked with Symantec for five or six years. I have also worked with a solution by McAfee. I found that the interface for Check Point is not as user-friendly as these solutions. The initial setup is also not as easy as Symantec.

We switched because of the pricing. Our cost was about $20 USD for each end-user, whereas with Check Point it is $3 USD or $4 USD per end-user.

The initial setup is a little complected in the beginning. I would say that it is of medium difficulty, and not as easy as Symantec.

Our deployment took between seven and ten days because we were transitioning from Symantec to Check Point. We did it slowly, starting in groups of about twenty people at a time. Once we saw that things were working okay, we did the full deployment.

In the beginning, we had help from an integrator. It was partly because our in-house team had some trouble understanding how Check Point works, so they had some problems.

The licensing cost for Check Point is $3 USD or $4 USD per end-user.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to consider their budget. This does not seem to be Check Point's area, although they are getting better.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Check Point Antivirus has a great design for network, security gateway deployment, threat detection, and prevention.                                              

Check Point Antivirus is a valuable tool for organizations because it helps them secure the network and data.                                                                              

The most valuable features of Check Point are threat cloud integration, sandboxing, and behavioral analysis.

Performance and resource consumption should be reduced. 

Additional features should be EDR, Advanced sandboxing technology, deeper cloud integration, etc.                                                                                         

I have been using it for the past four years.

The stability is good.

Scalability is good.

The support is good.

Positive

The initial setup is excellent.

We did the implementation in-house.

We have seen good ROI.

We also evaluated CrowdStike Falcon and Sophos Intercept X.