Check Point NGFW Reviews

I use the NGFW as a Firewalling device, for VPN tunneling, and for virtual patching. My environment is a two-tier network environment. I also use the Check Point NGFW as an IPS.

It really has improved my organization in terms of protecting my network against intrusion and zero days. I have been able to explicitly configure the blocking of certain attack vectors using Check Point NGFW.

The firewalling feature and the VPN functionality are excellent. With the firewalling functionality, I have been able to ward off intrusion from outside the network. With the VPN functionality, I have been able to allow secure remote connections from external customers and staff. 

CheckPoint would do good to add new features such as UEBA(User and Entity Behavior Analytics). 

They should also improve on the effectiveness of their antivirus. It should be more effective than competitors.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

I have been using Check Point NGFW for five years.

The product is very stable with no crashing or configuration corruption.

The solution is highly scalable and responsive.

The vendor is very professional and has the know-how.

Positive

I used to use the Cisco ASA 5500 series firewalling device.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The product was implemented through a third-party vendor.

We saw an ROI within one year.

It is very competitive relative to others on the market.

I was shown the POC and I fell in love with the fact that the Check Point NGFW has a GUI that allows for easy configuration. It also does firewalls very well. Therefore, I did not look at other options.

It is an awesome product!

Check Point's Next Generation Firewall has definitely improved our organization as we previously used a Linux firewall and we have had to manually configure internet control measures. When it comes to configuring firewall policies it was time-consuming. This has been taken care of by Check Point's Next Generation firewall. Even the integration to the Active Directory has been made to be seamless and requires a minimum effort from our security and network administrators. The technologies that are in place are amazing. For example, the Threat Extraction and Threat Emulation technologies. The Sandbox technology, or Threat Cloud, is world-class.

The remote access blade functionality is really valuable as we now need to just install the client on the user's machines and the client can be preconfigured with the site details. This makes our lives very simple. The logging of the firewall is also phenomenal as it is very granular and very easy to filter. 

The Application control blade is another valuable feature as we now only need to create a rule to be applied and to specify the applicable application which is categorized. The ability to configure dynamic objects, for example, Microsoft Office 365, is also a valuable feature.

The reports are very detailed and the variety is amazing. It caters to everything and is even more that what we had bargained for. They are also customizable, which makes them extremely valuable to us. 

Another great feature is the ability to publish corporate applications in a secure web environment.

Many problems have been solved with these firewalls and we've largely been very satisfied. Thanks to this infrastructure that we have managed, in this pandemic time, to quickly and effectively offer the potential to remotely work for everyone has been good. 

Also important is the separate management interface that has made it possible to carry out even the most operations while comfortably seated at the desk. It provides multiple profiles that you can apply depending on the scenario that presents itself.

It takes a while to install the rules so that if you make a mistake you can only fix it after a few minutes. There's no problem with traffic processing. 

Sometimes you are forced to interact on several levels: on the one hand, you put in the rules, and on the other, you put in the route. The predefined reports are few and it would be nice to increase them since the logs are excellent.

In my work experience, I have been able to use multiple firewall platforms. There are only two valid ones for me and one of them is definitely Check Point. The others charge less but there is a reason for that. It is a good idea to think carefully before rather than after you suffer from a serious attack.

We have been using the solution for three years now.

For me, the solution has been stable. Perhaps running it on a small scale helps.

I like the fact that it's so simple to scale.

I find the support to be very prompt. They go the extra mile to assist and are thorough in their troubleshooting.

I did not use a different solution, however, I came to know about this product while I was working for a company called Syrex.

It was set up for us by a company I used to work for.

It was through a vendor, and they were very good and did it on time as they promised.

A stable and fully functioning solution has enabled us to focus on other aspects of growing the business.

I looked at Fortigate, and it was not as clearly defined, and easy to follow as Check Point is.

Check Point does cost a lot, but for me, it's worth the money I paid.

Some of the products are easier to deploy. For example, the Harmony products are simpler as they have a per user/per device pricing model.

We use Check Point Gateways for securing our data centers including DMZ networks as well as gateways for our branch offices around the world. They are connected via MPLS, internet, or site-to-site VPNs depending on the branch connectivity.

A minimum standard for the whole environment is the NGFW. Firewall rules according to our security policy. VPN for site-to-site tunnels to our own gateways or to partners and customers. IPS is set primarily to prevent, and for some signatures to detect. 

Application Control is still in the early stages.

Firewalling is one of Check Point's core business attributes, and it just works.

Creating site-to-site VPNs between Check Point Gateways that are within the same management is unbelievably easy. If you create VPNs for 3rd parties and there are mismatches or issues, you will see logs that help pinpoint issues or misconfiguration.

Application control help with identifying applications and therefore makes firewall rules easier since changing ports don't have to be adapted every time an application changes or updates.

Generally speaking, all features are well documented and the two platforms help with configuration. Documentation and knowledgebase articles in the user center as well as user recommendation within the forums are great. The Admin Guides are really well documented, but it's a lot to read.

Check Point helps a lot with automatization which definitely reduces the effort to maintain the environment. The best example would be the CDT tool which helps with decreasing the amount of time for upgrading whole environments.

The policy installation length is still too long. It was promised that the time would be severely reduced in newer versions, but it is still too long. R81 promises at least parallel policy installations, which help in larger environments.

Check Point's advantage (to be able to configure everything) is also a disadvantage. The environment is quite complex. Troubleshooting is not always easy as there are a lot of possible debugs that can be taken, and the support will not always send the right or necessary debugs. Some debugs also can cause a heavy load, so you have to keep an eye on what you troubleshoot.

Our company has used Check Point for well over 10 years.

If it's running, it's stable. New setups have to be tested though.

The solution can be scaled from very small branch offices to huge data centers or even cloud data centers.

Support depends on how well you describe the issue and send information. Sometimes escalation is necessary.

The more features (blades) are turned on, the more complex the environment becomes. If something goes wrong, you have to rule out several issues (hardware, blades, et cetera).

We use this firewall to protect the internal network and to set up the IPSec standard from one location to another.

One of the benefits that we have realized from using this product is that the user interface makes it easier to operate, compared to using the CLI.  In Check Point 5.0, we bought the option, giving us the ability to use the GUI as well as the CLI. A person who is comfortable with the UI can work with it according to different scenarios.

The most valuable feature is the set of encryption options that are available.

Viewing the logs in the interface is easy to do, which is one of the things that I like.

This is a UI-based firewall that is easy to use.

The antivirus feature is a little bit weak and should be improved. The updates are not as regular when compared to other firewalls, such as Palo Alto.

The training materials and certification process should be improved. For example, the certificates are more expensive and there's no good training available on the internet right now.

I have been using Check Point NGFW for approximately seven years, since 2014.

The stability of this firewall is good and we haven't had any problems. It is a well-known, quality brand.

There are no issues with extendability or scalability. Over the course of a year, we added another firewall, bringing us from one to two deployments, and the process was not tough. We were easily able to manage it.

We have approximately 12 people who work with this firewall during different shifts.

I have been in contact with technical support many times, and they are good. Most of the time, they solve the problem as soon as possible, and they give a perfect solution.

Currently, we are using firewalls from different vendors, including Palo Alto and Cisco. Our Cisco ASA solution is completely CLI-based and Palo Alto is like Check Point with an interface that is a mix of UI and CLI-based.

Both Palo Alto and Cisco ASA have very good tutorials available on the internet, including videos on YouTube and courses on Udemy.

On the other hand, Cisco ASA is more difficult to use because there is no UI and for a person who does not have any knowledge of the networking commands, they have to learn them.

The first phase of the implementation is to plan the firewall deployment. After that, we do the configuration and validate it. In the case of a Check Point firewall, this process will take between two and three months to complete.

The complexity of the process depends on the features that you want to add. In general, it is straightforward and not too complex.

I was not present when the first firewall was set up, although I was presented for the deployment of new ones. Whenever there is a new firewall deployment, I am involved. We have between four and five network engineers who take care of this part.

There is no maintenance required from our side. When we have a hardware issue then we contact technical support to get it sorted out.

We have seen ROI; for the purpose that we have deployed this firewall, we are getting returns. Based on this, we are buying more Check Point firewalls.

The price of Check Point is lower than Palo Alto but higher than Cisco ASA. For us, the price for licensing is fine, we have no issue with it, and feel that the cost is justified.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Check Point NGFW is that if they get stuck, then visit the technical support section of the website and read the articles that are available. I have learned many things from the tech articles, and it's a good website if you want to learn about it in-depth.

One of the things that I learned is that Check Point firewalls also use Linux commands. After working with Check Point, I improved my Linux skills, which is a good thing for me.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The Next Generation Firewalls, the 64000 and 44000 series, provide us with support for large data centers and telco environments. They're quite reliable and provide great performance.

There are a lot of features which help us in providing a more secure environment for our organization, such as when we have Active-Active.

The most valuable feature is that the scalable 64000 Next Generation Firewalls are designed to excel in large data centers and the telco environment as well. We have a lot of these types of customers, and these Check Point firewalls support them.

In addition 

• it supports dynamic objects, which we use for security purposes
• the antivirus is quite effective
• the logging and tracking are quite easy
• overall, it is easy to use.

The area where Check Point can improve is the antivirus, as it only provides a small number of updates for it. Updates should be more frequent.

In addition, the certification process is quite expensive. It should be a little cheaper so that everyone can be trained and certified and have better knowledge of Check Point's products.

I have been using Check Point's firewalls for more than a year. My responsibilities include implementing changes on the firewalls and troubleshooting.

They're quite stable and quite good. Management is simple because we can implement a lot of changes on the firewalls through the central manager.

They're quite scalable because they support large data centers, while offering reliability and performances as well.

The initial setup is quite easy. You don't need much training for it. Deployment takes around one week.

We have different stages in the setup process and we follow all the stages. We have to give structure to the plan, outline what we need to do. That goes to our manager, our senior experts, for approval. Then we implement the changes after their approval. Once the changes are implemented, we have our team leaders who validate whether everything is good and as expected or not. Then we close it. This is the basic strategy we follow in our organization.

About 500 to 600 employees work on Check Point firewalls in our organization and they have different roles. For example, I handle network and security admin. There are also security associates, consultants, and analysts.

The pricing of Check Point's firewalls is good. It is not that expensive.

We use it as a normal firewall for perimeter security, using some of the Next Generation features, like Anti-Bot and Antivirus. 

We have two ISPs. We have a different firewall system in front of the Check Point Firewall. We also have normal Cisco switches combined with the Check Point solution. Then, our internal network is with Cisco, which is about 300 servers and 1,500 clients.

Since we are an insurance company, the solution is a necessity.

Two-thirds of our employees are working at home at the moment, so we use the VPN feature more than we used to. Of those two-thirds, only 100 or 200 are using the remote client from Check Point. The other employees are using other technologies, like NetScaler from Citrix. 

We use the basic firewall functionality, plus the VPN functionality, a lot.

We have about 100 remote sites, which is where we use the VPN functionality. For private lines, we prefer to do further private encryption on the line. It is very convenient to do it with Check Point, if you have Check Point on both sides. It is convenient and easy to monitor.

The firewall feature and DDoS Protector, when turned on, keep away attacks from the outside. They also prevent users from accessing things on the Internet that they are not supposed to access.

The Threat Emulation definitely needs improvement. A couple of years ago, we did a comparison with other companies, e.g., Lastline, offering threat emulation and threat detection functionalities, and Check Point was lacking. 

I have been using Check Point for 22 to 23 years. I have been using Check Point NGFW for 15 years, since 2005.

We used to have more problems. For the past five years, unless we have had a bug, which happens like once a year, it has been pretty stable. We did have a bug for the last three months, which has just been fixed. Before that we had another two or three major bugs. However, when there is a bug and it's not known to Check Point, they need quite a while to get it fixed. If they have a fix already, then there is a pretty quick turnaround to get it fixed.

There are three people working on firewalls, but not at 100 percent. We have the equivalent of one person doing firewalls 100 percent of the time using three people.

For our requirements, it's scalable enough. We have a 1 gig uplink to the Internet, which is easily doable with open servers. 

We used to have some problems with the performance, then we upgraded the license and the scalability has worked well since.

There are 1,200 to 1,500 users.

It depends whether the problem is known to Check Point. If they are aware there is a problem, quite often it will then depend on which tech you finally land on if it's easier or harder to get to the root cause. The last issue was in India so that was pretty bad. It's easier if you get directly through to Tel Aviv or Ottawa, but you can't choose. Once they know what the issue is, it's pretty good. It pretty much depends on the engineer that you get. There are pretty good engineers and there are many engineers who are at just the starter level at Check Point who are not really into the stuff. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's easy, depending on the problem and the tech engineer you get.

To the next manager, it's pretty easy to escalate an issue, if needed. Though, it depends on the manager. 

Our current sales staff isn't too good. Though, the one before was pretty good. So, you can escalate on that process well. As an escalation path, it works most of the time.

Once you do it for over 20 years, it is straightforward. If you have done it a couple of times, then you know what to do. However, even if you are a beginner, Check Point is more straightforward than Palo Alto or something like that. Once you get the idea of how a firewall works, Check Point does it that way.

There is a central location where we deploy upgrades, which normally take one business day since we have several clusters there. 

When deploying the solution to remote locations, we have several models to choose from.

When we tried Threat Emulation, we have received professional services from Check Point. However, for the normal setup, we don't involve any professional services.

It is like insurance for us.

The pricing and licensing are pretty steep. They know that they are good, so they are pricey.

We are also using Forcepoint, which is a little bit different on the OS and focused more on IPS/IDS. It is a good practice to combine two different firewall vendors in case one of them gets hacked.

We also evaluated Palo Alto, like five years ago, but that doesn't make much sense for us. 

Since we are trying to get our customers to do more self-service, we should see more inbound traffic. So, the usage will increase in the next two years.

We get more attacks from the outside these days, so it has become more important to use systems like Check Point. When I started with security 25 years ago, it was still something not everybody was aware they needed. Today, it's common sense that everybody needs to protect their perimeter.

Plan first, implement last. You should first be aware of what assets you want to protect and what are your traffic patterns. You should plan your policy and network topology ahead of time, then start to implement a firewall. If you just place it there without any plan of what it's supposed to do, it doesn't make too much sense. I think planning is 80 percent of the implementation.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10. It would be better if the support was quicker in the cases we had. Apart from that, we are happy with the functionality.

It is a typical firewall that has been implemented in most of our regions. We use it for normal firewall policies and VPNs.

We are mainly using Check Point firewalls. We also have a few Check Point cloud security programs.

Everything can be managed from a single dashboard nowadays.

Since we upgraded to R.80 from our previous R.77 version, the activity of my team has improved a lot. We don't have to open multiple consoles or go to multiple nodes. Even though we are managing multiple solutions of Check Point, they feel similar to us now.

The most valuable feature is the Check Point Management Server, especially version R.80 onward. We can manage everything. We have endpoint security, cloud security, and email security. Everything can be managed from a single management server, making this a very unique and easy solution to use in the market now.

From a technical perspective, it is an easy solution to use. Everything seems perfect. We are not using all of its features, like sandboxing. 

The main thing for a normal operations guy who is creating tools and firewalls, it is quite difficult to manage. It requires an expert level of knowledge in Check Point products to manage these scalable platform appliances and the virtual firewall that comes with it. We have to educate our guys and give them training on a regular basis to work on these products. Otherwise, it's fine.

About five years.

It is pretty stable. It hasn't caused many issues over the years, unlike normal network issues. They do release bug fixes at least once a month. We keep very good track of that and update the patches regularly, but we haven't run into bigger issues so far. So, I'd say it is quite stable. 

The firewall is very easy to use and hasn't caused much trouble for us over the years.

From a scalability perspective, they have a solutions like Check Point Maestro. Therefore, it is easy to upscale nowadays.

We have over 200,000 end users.

They should improve the support a bit. Though they have expert engineers in tech, sometimes the amount of time to get back a solution for an issue is more than what is acceptable, even though it is a high priority.

During a scheduled activity or an implementation, they find their highest level of support. During an implementation, I never faced an issue with the support. I would rate them a nine out of ten for this.

The company has been using Check Point firewalls for the past 10 years. Before that, they used Cisco ASA.

Mostly, I have worked on Check Point products. Therefore, the initial setup was straightforward. It was not that complicated. 

I can spin up a firewall and put it in production within an hour. If it's a migration from a different solution or upgrading an existing management solution, it might take some time because of the planning. There are a lot of things that have to be a part of the implementation or migration activities.

We do it ourselves most of the time. We only take help when it comes to scalable platforms, like big chassis firewalls, which are little complicated. Then, we get outside help.

I manage the operations team and have also been involved as a consultant.

We have some best practices in place that we follow.

There are four security engineers who deploy and maintain this solution.

Comparatively, Check Point pricing is a little high. However, if you have that budget, I would recommend anybody to go with Check Point.

For cloud security purposes, we looked at FortiGate. In the end, we decided to go with Check Point. Primarily, we went with Check Point because of the fee. We also already had expertise on Check Point and the team is comfortable around it. We like that Check Point has a single dashboard. Feedback from peers suggests that the support in India for NGFWs is not as good with other vendors as it is at Check Point.

Get a team who has expertise on this product and educate your team. Give them training. If Check Point is using a new version, make sure your team is aware of that. If there are any changes, let them know and make them comfortable working around this product because we have had some issues due to lack of expertise.

If you don't have an expert in-house team for implementation, I would strongly recommend getting help of the Check Point professional services team. There are a few third-party operational services, but I would go with Check Point professional services.

We are planning to increase our usage of the solution. Every project that we take on has Check Point security products as part of the solution.

I would give this solution an eight out of 10 because of the support. They take too much time when they should give you a result.

In our organization, we are using distributed device management. Here, management and distributed devices are separate deployments. Therefore, our management is very easy in our organization for traffic management. Here, tier architectures are used. That smart console, smart getaway, and management are different devices. Each device is connected to the other. 

Threat prevention is used as well. Basically, threat prevention is used for preventative management traffic entering into our internal organization. The hash value is used whether traffic is legitimate or not for distributed traffic. 

We are using Check Point for URL filtering. 

In our organization, we are using policy configurations where various policies are configured for internal to outside organization communication, and our DM's are there too. Various zones are created in our organization. 

For each particular zone, if I want to communicate with the external zone, then I need to create a policy for internal to external. Various rules can be created, particularly for organization communication outside the organization. It will be configured in our organization and four gateways are there allowing for our four different locations to communicate. 

In our HR deployment, hiring deployment, there is a new and legacy mode that we are currently using.

The distributed deployment is very helpful. This way, the burden on each device is less and management is very easy and CPU process utilization will be not high on a particular device - it'll be distributed on each device. Management is very easy.

We like that it is a next-generation firewall where hackers would need to inspect down to a seventh layer, an application layer, and that offers us better protection. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

The solution can scale.

We would like to see constant improvement in anti-malware functionality and anti-threat protection.

Various functions affect our organization's traffic performance.

They need more focus on the stability of IP security.

The organization has used the solution for five years, however, I only joined the company two years ago. 

It provides very good stability for traffic management and network flow. We monitor various locks that will be there for internal and external traffic. I'd like, however, more stability of IP security, more of that is needed. Sometimes there is an issue in IP security clarity.

The scale is currently very good. In our organization around 3000 or more employees use it. There is two IT personnel that will configure 30 Check Points, 13,500 gateways will be there and it will handle around 3000 plus employees. 

We will increase usage. Currently, one new branch will be open. They are also migrating from Fortinet to Check Point's firewall. The previous they did 40 deployments here, however, currently they're migrating to the Check Point next-generation firewall.

Tech support is very good. After logging the call, if there is an issue discovered, they are very supportive. They are helpful and responsive. We've very happy with them.

We used to use Fortinet, however, it did not go deep enough and check down to layer seven.

The initial setup was straightforward. That said, I wasn't part of the initial setup, as it was set up before I came to work with the organization.

I'm comfortable with the licensing. The pricing, for what you get, is pretty reasonable. 

I'm an end-user of the product. I don't have a specific business relationship with the company.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.