Check Point NGFW Reviews

The primary use is to segregate the environment internally to create a lab environment and a production environment, for example. We also use them to protect the company from the internet and when going to the internet; to protect the perimeter of the company. We use them to create a VPN with customers and clients, and with the other companies that belong to the group.

We work with 1200s, 1500s, 4000s, and 5000s.

With this firewall on the perimeter, we detect a lot of attacks with the IPS and the antivirus blades. With the SmartLog for our team that operates the solution, we have a very intuitive way of searching the logs and seeing events, when compared to other vendors that we also have. This is the biggest advantage of the Check Point compared to competitors.

We have a lot of Check Point firewalls and a lot of Fortinet firewalls. The biggest advantage of the Check Point for us is that daily operations are much easier. That includes working with policies, checking and searching logs, dragging objects on the policies and searching where objects are used. All of that is easier in the SmartConsole than doing it on a browser, as the competitors do.

The most valuable features are the

• security blades 
• ease of managing the policies, searching log for events, and correlating them.

Upgrades and debugging of the operating system, as well as the backups and restores of configuration, need improvement. 

Debugging is very complex when compared to Fortinet, for example. That's the worst thing about Check Point. The deployment of the solution is harder than it is with the competitors. But after you've deployed it, the operation is easy.

I have been using Check Point firewalls for about eight years.

They are very stable. We usually deploy them in clusters, in front of the node. We always have the other one functioning and we have never had an occasion in which one failed and the other also failed. We also have support for the hardware. But regarding their functioning, we are very satisfied. We have never had a big outage because the two members of a cluster went down. They are very good in terms of stability.

We have some firewalls with the VSX functionality which allows us to add more virtual firewalls to the same physical cluster. That allows for scalability. But when compared to Fortinet, the way to have more than one virtual firewall on the same cluster is much harder.

It's very scalable if we have the VSX license for Check Point, which we have in some places. But it's much more complex than adding to the FortiGate. So it's scalable, but it's not easy to work with VSX, especially compared to the competitor.

Our usage should be increasing weekly because our company is buying other companies constantly and we need to deploy firewalls on the companies we buy. It shouldn't increase a lot, though, just a bit.

We have about 1,000 users crossing the firewalls and 10 network admins.

The technical support is good in general, but it's better if you call and you are answered by the headquarters back in Israel. We notice a difference if we call at different times and we go through Canada or some other country. It's not bad, but we notice a bit of a difference in the way they handle the tickets and the knowledge they have.

We usually try to open tickets when we know that the office in Israel is open and they are taking the tickets. But there are some times that we can't do that. The others are not bad, but for some stuff we need quicker support and we feel we are being handled better on the Israeli side.

The initial setup is complex and when you have issues, it's more complex. 

To create a cluster or to add a new firewall to the Manager, or when, for example, you want to add a license for IPS or for antivirus, there are often problems with that because it doesn't recognize the license. We end up having to call support. With Fortinet, that kind of initial setup of the firewall is always straightforward.

Now that we have a lot of experience it takes us two days, at the most, to deploy a Check Point firewall, if we don't run into problems with the license.

We are not at the data center, so we need to ask the data center guys to mount the firewall where we need it and to patch it. Then we access it via a console cable, remotely. We have equipment that allows us to do that. We do the initial config via the GUI, and then we add the firewall to the Manager and we start deploying the policies.

We implement the firewalls ourselves.

The return on our investment with Check Point firewalls is that we are secure and that we haven't had any attacks that have had a big impact or that were successful. If we had been paying a lot and were being targeted to the same extent, I would say no, that we have not had a return on investment, but at this stage it's a "yes."

In the past, when Fortinet was a young company, the price point of Fortinet was very low compared to Check Point. But at this stage, our experience is that the pricing is almost the same. The pricing of Check Point is fair when compared to others.

The only additional cost we have with Check Point is when we need to do a big migration. Sometimes we need a third-party company, but this is not usual. It's only for big migrations that we sometimes have support from an external company. The last time we needed something like that was two years ago.

Half of our environment is with Check Point and the other half is with Fortinet. We don't have a strategy of giving everything to one vendor; we like to have both.

If the person implementing it doesn't have much experience in how the solution works, with the Manager and connecting the firewall to it, and using the SmartConsole, they should try to go through the CCSA materials for Check Point certification. Check Point is easy to work with on a daily basis. Sometimes we get new people working here and they can add rules straight away on the policies and push policies. But if they need to deploy a firewall and they are not used to Check Point and how it works and the components, it's not that straightforward. With competitors like Fortinet, you just have to access the HTTPS of the FortiGate and it's like configuring a router, which is much easier. With Check Point, you need to read some manuals before you start deploying the firewall.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Check Point firewalls is that if you lose the Manager you lose the ability to manage the firewall policies, which is, in my opinion, the biggest difference when compared to other vendors. Because, for example, if the Manager stops working and the server where you have the Manager gets stuck, you have no way of managing the policies directly on the firewall.

I support multiple environments in Brazil, including banks, schools, government, and the military, mostly with on-premise equipment. Some of these environments had more than 30 Check Point NGFW clusters and some of these have 4 on-premise appliances on each cluster, using the full capabilities of the Check Point Blades.

Using the firewall blades, and the threat prevention blades, we can provide big security for our customers. In the lo4j case, Check Point acts fast and all of the systems are already protected from the threat.

My organization already used Check Point before I arrived, however, compared with open-source firewalls, is in another tier. The usability and maintenance are so much better.

The management in Check Point is exceptional. The Smartconsole feature centralizes the management features, reports, log visualizing, rules, objects, et cetera.

The Check Point could use more time to upgrade the VPN configurations console. At the moment it is not easy to configure some VPN S2S in Check Point. You need to keep opening several groups, objects, and options to configure one simple VPN.

I've used the solution for one year.

The stability is very good!

The scalability is very good.

The initial levels of support are not that good. 

Positive

We used pfSense and suggest just to go for the corporative product.

I don't have insights about the pricing for Check Point.

We did not evaluate other options. 

The need to get faster bug resolving issues. For example, the R80.40 has so many bugs at the moment. 

I use CheckPoint in our data center to control the internet and to enable threat prevention. I then integrate it into my center and to my events.

I like the SmartEvent feature. When we see a threat, SmartEvent can create a rule for that. SmartEvent works with the SmartCenter to block a threat attack with a block monitor. The SmartCenter has the management for all the firewalls and data centers in a single dashboard.

It could be more stable and scalable. Check Point price and support could be better.

I have ten years of experience using Check Point NGFW.

Check Point NGFW could be more stable. I think the problem is that the kernel sometimes won't play ball and isn't stable. Sometimes, they have a block, and we have to spend a lot of time fixing it. In contrast, I think Palo Alto and Fortinet are more stable.

Check Point NGFW could be more scalable. I think Palo Alto has more plugins and features, and Check Point needs more features. However, Check Point integration is very complex.

Check Point support could be better. I think Palo Alto has a very clear pricing model. When we have an issue, we create a ticket and receive fast service from Palo Alto. It's good.

The initial setup, in my experience, isn't simple as Fortinet and Palo Alto. It would be better if the person doing it has experience. 

I implemented this solution by myself.

The price could be better. I think Palo Alto pricing is high, and Check Point isn't much better. FortiGate is cheaper. I think when I implemented this solution, I recommended buying a yearly subscription.

When I choose a solution for a customer, I must verify the features, current specifications and make recommendations. When we use an all-in-one firewall solution, we usually recommend using a Palo Alto external firewall. This is because Fortinet has an SD-WAN solution and firewalls, and Palo Alto is the same. But I don't think Check Point has one. When a customer doesn't want to implement many solutions, we recommend using Fortinet or Palo Alto.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Check Point NGFW an eight.

The main use case is Firewall provisioning and integration with Tufin and Skybox. Also, we focus on firewall compliance, rule review, VPN configuration, and network troubleshooting.

Working for one of the largest companies, I found that using Check Point has made firewall provisioning very easy for us, and integration with the above-mentioned tools has eased the process of PCI audit, security compliance, and rule recertification.

I think the VSX has been the most valuable feature for us. We use it for tunnel management, which is great. The configuration has been quite straightforward.

Debugging could be improved when compared to the competition.

I think the product release lifecycle should be improved.                                                       

We have been using Check Point NGFW for almost eight years.

Previously, we used Cisco ASA. We switched because of the fact that Check Point offers more stability and visibility into the firewalls. Management is easier, especially using the GUI version.

I think that the pricing is different for every organization.

We did evaluate Juniper, as well.

We are using this solution for the security enhancement of our internal company network. This is to protect our customers as well as internal users from the untrusted network or outside world.

I am using the physical appliances of Check Point Firewall as well as virtual machines (VMs). We are using the same versions of R80 on our VMs that we are using for our physical appliances.

It saves a lot of manpower. If we have centralized management, then we do not require as many members on our team. So, this is a cost saving feature. If there wasn't centralized management, we would need 30 members instead of 11 members for our team. 

The nicest feature is the centralized management of multiple firewalls. With the centralized management, we can easily use and operate multiple firewalls as well as create a diagram of them. 

It has various features, like Threat Prevention and Antivirus. It is easier to use and have knowledge of a single device rather than multiple devices/technologies when doing an installation. It is also easy to use because of having Antivirus and Threat Prevention features within the same firewall.

I would like the user interface to be more user-friendly. I want the UI to be easier to use than Check Point's competitors. 

We have been using this technology for the last four years.

Check Point is the one of the most trusted vendors in the market. All the Checkpoint Firewall updates are very nice. We get the updates every months, and they are very stable updates.

The solution is very scalable. It is easy to expand it, if required. and doesn't take too much time. It also doesn't require too much manpower.

There are 2000 to 4000 people who are indirectly using Check Point Firewall.

It is always a good experience to work with their technical support. They are knowledgeable, always finding a solution. If we send them a bug, they fix it as soon as they can. 

I previously used Cisco ASA Firewalls for network security. 

Check Point is more advanced in comparison to Cisco Firewall. It has many good features, like central management, Threat Prevention, and Antivirus included in one device. With Cisco, we didn't have that.

The setup is straightforward, not complex; it was a simple setup. For the physical firewall, we just required a physical appliance, then we set it up according to our requirements. We had the complete setup guidelines. We used the three-tier hierarchy, which is standard and recommended for Check Point. We could also purchase service from Check Point to assist with the setup process. So, it was a good experience.

Our deployment took six to eight months.

We didn't require Check Point's help during deployment. After deployment, we did require their help for critical cases.

This product provides a complete return on investment. It gives us the level of security that we expect and should have.

The pricing and licensing part is something that could be improved. Check Point license and pricing are a bit higher compared to competing firewalls. I think they can work on that.

We didn't require an evaluation process. We knew that we had to go for Check Point.

I would rate the solution an eight out of 10.

The biggest thing is the central management. It is quite good and allows us to manage the different firewalls from it. We can implement and configure many firewalls and push our policies to them as well.

One of the most valuable features is the antivirus. It's very good.

We also now support cascading objects. We didn't support this previously, but on Check Point we do.

The dashboard is quite good, you can explore a lot of features there and it's easy to understand.

It also gives us SSL inspection, which provides more effective mitigation of defects and data leakage.

The antivirus is not as effective as it could be because updates are not that frequent.

Another area for improvement is that certifications are quite expensive with Check Point.

I've been using the Check Point Next Generation Firewall for the last year.

My role includes working on Check Point and Cisco ASA firewalls to make changes on them, per customer requirements or as the organization needs. I also explore new features and do troubleshooting.

It's quite stable. Until now, we haven't faced any issues.

The Check Point 44000 and 64000 Next Generation Firewalls are designed to be quite scalable. 

If we do face an issue which is not our support boundaries, we involve the Check Point TAC. They're quite technical, so they help us to resolve things. They are always helpful. They're knowledgeable and their response time is very fast.

Previously we were working on Cisco ASA firewall which didn't support the cascading objects. Also, Cisco supports two gateways, whereas the Check Point supports up to five gateways.

We also decided to bring on Check Point because there are a lot of switches that are not supported in Cisco ASA. Also, with Cisco, IPS does not come with the firewall and we have to configure it separately. The Check Point IPS comes with it.

There are a lot of features which are not supported in the Cisco ASA Firewalls.

The initial setup of the firewall is straightforward. I didn't find any difficulties in moving from Cisco ASA to Check Point. The dashboard is quite friendly, so it didn't take much time to learn.

Deployment took about three days.

We have different stages in our implementation process like planning, approving, implementing, checking and validating, and the last one is matching. Job roles in our organization go according to these stages the approvals. I do the planning part and my approval request goes to my team leader.

We have about 400 to 500 users. They are semi-technical or non-technical people, such as network and security engineers, who are tracking and monitoring the firewalls. If we're talking about troubleshooting we have from different levels, like L1, L2, L3.

It's saving us a notable amount of time. 

Check Point is good. It has a lot of features which will support a lot of things in your organization, and the dashboard is quite good. There are a lot of features, such as data protection and data inspection, at a good price.

We use them to protect our edge infrastructure and for interconnecting our sites using the VPN.

One of the most valuable features is the data center object integration with Azure. We are using Azure a lot and there is very nice synchronization between the objects in Azure, and it's very easy to implement rules using this feature.

Other valuable features include: 

• the VPN — it's quite easy to configure it and it provides us with an easy way to interconnect our sites.
• the CLI, for automating things
• it is very easy to manage, to make backups, and to configure
• the support and the graphical user interface.

The NAT services part needs improvement. It's not sophisticated. It needs functions like range assignment for NATing. The way you assign a list of IPs for NATing is too simple. It just allows you to use pools.

There could also be improvement to the automation. They should provide a tool for creating and maintaining rules.

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

The stability is an eight out of 10 because we have had some problems with URL filtering, with the domain filtering in particular. When the domain is under a CDN, it sometimes gives us problems because there is more than one IP for each domain.

We have also had problems with data center objects or Azure objects where we have created a rule and the rule stops working. We opened a case with Check Point and they answered us. We installed fixes and it looks like it's working now.

The scalability is quite nice at the firewall level. It gives us the possibility of implementing clusters and high-availability.

We are also working on an Azure implementation and it looks good. We have not yet deployed to the Azure Check Point implementation, but it promises a lot.

We have about 200 employees and, on the administrative side, there are 12 to 15 people working with the Check Point solution. They are mostly networking infra engineers. We are using about 40 percent of the firewall capacity. We don't currently have plans to increase capacity.

We are satisfied with the support. When we have a problem, it's very easy to contact the support center and they give a fast response. I would give their support a nine out of 10.

I have worked with the Cisco ASA firewalls and with firewalls from manufacturers like MikroTik.

It's hard to measure ROI, but our sense of security, as a company, is good with Check Point.

In terms of quality versus price, Check Point is very balanced.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Check Point firewalls is that if you know how to work with Linux, you will be able to manage almost all the features.

We wanted to deploy a specialized Next-Generation Firewall in our perimeter security.

The solution addresses the Security requirements at Perimeter Layer including:

1. Network IPS
2. Application Control
3. IPSEC VPN
4. SSL VPN.
5. Proxy

It was required to enable IPSEC VPN between our vendors across the world

We got positive responses on Check Point Firewalls from our vendors as well.

Our team addresses the regular audits with a Next-Generation Firewall, starting from configuration and application vulnerabilities to customized reporting.

We have planned to achieve many business use cases including IPS, Network AV, Content Awareness - Data Leakage Prevention, IPSEC VPNs between our peers, SSL VPN with Posture Assessment, and Web Proxy as well.

This solution addressed most of our needs but required multiple license subscriptions.

Below are the few Business use cases we achieved through Check Point NGFW:

1. SSL VPN with Security Posture Assessment
2. SSL VPN with In-build Multi-Factor Authentication Option (Certificate + User Credentials)
3. Content Filtering (Identity Awareness and DLP)
4. Forward Proxy with Web and Application Control
5. Enabling Anti-Bots and IPS

The SSL VPN with posture assessment helped us to remove the dedicated Standalone SSL VPN solution which was benefited both commercially and technically.

Anti-Bots and IPS enabled security on the network traffic.

Along with VPN and Proxy (Web and application control), we removed another standalone proxy for internal use and extended the content filtering to roaming users as well.

The security posture assessment with two-factor authentication has saved more time and commercial costs by avoiding deploying having to deploy another solution.

It took so many weeks to migrate our old firewall to Check Point after we did internal and external assessments on earlier setups and enabled multiple security features.

We had difficulty configuring the NAT. For example, instead of following A-B-C, we need to do A-C-B

Initially, we faced a few challenges with firmware. Later this was addressed with jumbo hotfixes.

We tried to create a single management software to manage the policies, view the logs, have a mobile access VPN, and do reporting.

Please concentrate on local services enablement for faster resolutions.

We have been using this solution since July 2020.

Initially, we faced a few challenges with the firmware. We later addressed this with help of jumbo and custom hotfixes. Later, it performed well.

The solution is scalable in terms of enabling the features and deploying management servers.

We would recommend they have regular feedback sessions with customers.

Neutral

We used another firewall that enables basic security features with lot of limitations.

We found the setup difficult in the earlier stages as our team used to work with another CLI-based solution.

Our In-house team handled the implementation. 

I'd advise users to validate the licensing model during the pre-evaluation period itself. It took a few days for us to understand DLP and Mobile Access Blades that had to be procured separately along with the NGTP bundle to address our requirements.

We evaluated Palo Alto and FortiGate.