Check Point NGFW Reviews

We have deployed this product for the protection of our MPLS connection between 20 geographic distinct sites, two data centers, and an internet connection.

We are also using the product to establish IPsec tunnels with 5 external entities totally transparent to our users.

We're a new company that started to invest in cybersecurity and protection products and chose Check Point for their cloud solutions that protect a vast majority of our devices. 

We are happy with the deployment of the product and the ease of use.

Since the deployment and go-live of the solution, we noted a rise in productivity of some people, we think it has to do with the deployment of the application control and web filtering capabilities of the product.

We're also happy with the deployment process and the help that the Check Point partner provided in the initial configuration of the product. 

Our users also noted more speed on the internet connection, as I said probably because of the block rules implemented with the features mentioned above.

I have to say that it was Application Control and web filtering are excellent. We knew we had users watching videos and using not approved apps yet didn't have a way to centrally block them. With NGFW we do and we can set up profiles/groups of users with different permissions which allow for example IT to have media streaming access and "regular" users don't.

Also having a VPN concentrator on the same device is a plus since made our user management with Active Directory connection a lot easier and faster.

We're a new company so regarding additional features we can name only a few, for example, a better API for extracting data so that we can integrate with our monitoring solution, at the moment we use Nagios/Icinga.

It would be nice if there is a mobile-friendly console for our techs so that they can help users when not at their desks since they do frequent external work.

Better connection between the legacy console and the new one since we have a company that still uses an on-prem device and we have to use two consoles.

We've been using this product for one year.

We didn't use a previous solution. 

I'd advise others to read the license differences and features.

We've evaluated Fortinet and Forscout products.

We're an international research laboratory, focused on thermonuclear energy experiments. Due to strong remote collaboration, and to control network communication, we choose the Check Point NG Firewall solution.

Most of the personnel are researchers. We also have a strong collaboration with a University and take care of a European Ph.D. on thermonuclear fusion, as the future clean energy.

We aim to constantly improve firewall technology, which is a key strategy nowadays. We've chosen Check Point in 2007 and step-by-step upgrade and expand cyber security deployment using their solution. 

We appreciate the support and escalation when issues are in place. We really appreciate the solidity of the solution, the redundancy, we own a couple of appliances in failover. 

We use Check Point to grant VPN access both for clients and also in specific site-to-site IPSec remote connections.

I like the dashboard, redundancy, log analysis, threat prevention and ISP, and VPN.

The dashboard has clean and focused menus and tabs, that offer immediate access to important information and configuration. 

Log analysis is really powerful considering the enormous amount of logged data. 

We use a specific function to control bandwidth occupation based on protocols and IP subnetworks.

Fundamental is the interoperability with RSA SecurID, Windows AD/Azure.

We're in the process of moving to the MS O365 cloud, and Check Point helps us with this.

Maybe the VPN clients could be improved, however, only from a cosmetic point of view. They use a very old GUI and should help remote assistance in case of problems to make it more accessible in terms of getting log/debug information. On this, I suggest an approach like ZOOM US, where is clearly defined the application life cycle, and users warned over time.

We're in the process of moving to a cloud hybrid solution based on MS Azure, and on that field, quite common nowadays, it seems that more has to be done, moving from on-premise historical deployment. 

IoT should be considered in future development.

I've used the solution since 2007.

It is an absolutely stable solution. It is easy to put maintenance on an appliance without losing any connectivity.

The last release, R81, is impressive, at least in these first months, having recently upgraded from R80.

My experience is good, both on technical issues, and commercial support during renewal.

Positive

We previously used a Cisco PIX firewall.

The setup is somewhat complex, however, technical documents are clear, and the most common solutions are well described.

We implemented it with a third party and in-house. The support company that helped in Italy is fantastic.

We may need more time to measure ROI.

Check Point is not a cheap solution, however, on cyber security, we prefer to stay with a key player.

We constantly verify other vendor solutions, such as Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Sophos.

We have different cloud platforms within the organization and needed a solution that would allow us to control different aspects of them from one single platform, which has allowed us to manage and apply policies across all different locations. 

It has allowed us to be more efficient with compliance and maintenance of all different platforms; management of the users is now tighter, and fewer resources have to be invested in applying all the needed policies and levels of access based on company roles.

The product provides a full security posture for our cloud environment. We get complete visibility of all the workload hosted across all different platforms and all traffic coming in/ out of these cloud platforms. These policies are on 24/7 from any device, say desktop, laptop, mobile, etc. 

All this is pretty easy to set up and notifies any anomaly as soon as it arises for immediate attention/ correction; some of these issues will be addressed automatically and just let you know it was identified and solved.

The management console offers excellent visibility of all security options and configurations, also showing all the traffic from each user. 

Once you're working on a specific action, the interface will pop relevant information around past actions contradicting the new policy, showing you strictly where potential threats may come from. 

Admins and executives are more at ease with the compliance engine within the software as it measures how many of the security requirements we're compliant with, making their work much more accessible from that standpoint.

This is something that doesn't directly affect us. However, I know VMware is not supported by the platform. 

Also, it seems that plenty of features you may not know even exist unless you do some extensive, deep digging as they're not coming up in the initial configuration, so you have to go through the documentation to realize their existence. 

Support is really good, so you may rely on them to learn more about these coded features I'm talking about, also to make the proper calibration for the rules/policies you're applying as they may not turn the results expected from the first config.

We've used the solution for +2 years now.

We use the solution as a frontend firewall in our headquarters and in our branches. We use packet inspection, the antispam feature, and the VPN. We have configured threat prevention and content awareness to improve security on incoming email and on web surfing from interlan networks wits SSL inspection. Mobile access through the VPN mobile client is also used from all outside workers and is fully integrated with our AD. We also use the solution to route traffic on internal networks and manage security through client and server networks.

We have improved our performance and bandwidth through the networks. Security is also improved. We have better control over the logs and better integration with our SIEM. 

We can also manage all our firewall from a central management console so each policy is under control and can be developed better. Inline policies help to understand on the correct use of the policies and a more readable list. We can also manage policies in two or more people at once without problems or risk of making the wrong policy.

VPN and mobile VPN are extremely valuable to us. The policies are simple to deploy to the new branches. 

All policies can be deployed and managed in a very simple way. 

AD single sign-on with VPN mobile is very helpful and simple to manage and deploy. 

Log management is also a good place to make troubleshooting and through console manage events. 

Management of the object is also a valuable feature. At every point in the console you can manage object properties and look to each policy where it is used and simply change or find where the object is involved.

Some features, like the VPN, antispam, data loss prevention, etc., are managed in an external console. In the future, I'd like all features in the same console, in one place, where we can see and configure all features. I'd like a web console so that all firewalls can be managed from a web browser and we don't need to be installed on dedicated consoles and applications. 

I use the web console to mange the Gaia software in the firewall and it would be nice to have also policy management inside the web browser. 

I've used the solution for four months.

It is very stable. We have reboot only to install updates.

We chose the solution for scalability and now we are running with all branches with a Check Point firewall. The solution is meeting our expectations.

We do not need customer support.

Positive

We did use a different solution. We switched to improve security.

It was complex to set up due to the fact that we changed our mind on how the firewall works. Central management is hard to improve.

We implemented it through a vendor. There was not a high level of expertise, however, I took a course with Check Point and that was very clear and now I'm very expert on the Check Point world.

We have seen an ROI in that we need less time on managed policies and we have better control.

The cost is high but the benefits are too.

We also looked at Palo Alto, WatchGuard, and Fortinet.

The solution is a good solution and at the top of the market.

Check Point Security Gateway GAIA R80.30 is used as our secure gateway firewall. We have configured two gateways as active-passive in cluster mode. 

We also use R80.30 as our security management server to configure the policies on the firewall. We use it primarily to control traffic and secure our network perimeter against unknown attacks. The rules and policies for the SSL VPN connections are configured on the mobile access blade. We use the policies to segregate and filter the traffic flow.

This is for a bank environment.

A traditional firewall provides a stable inspection of network traffic. It allows or blocks traffic based on state, port, and protocol, and filters traffic based on administrator-defined rules.

A next-generation firewall (NGFW) does this, and so much more. In addition to access control, NGFWs can block modern threats such as advanced malware and application-layer attacks. According to Gartner's definition, a next-generation firewall must include:

• Standard firewall capabilities like stateful inspection
• Integrated intrusion prevention
• Application awareness and control to see and block risky apps
• Threat intelligence sources
• Techniques to address evolving security threats

Check Point Endpoint anti-malware benefits include:

• Improves user productivity and frees up system resources
• The industry’s fastest malware and anti-virus scan and boot time
• The smallest memory and disk footprints
• A single-console centralized management
• Prevention of malware from accessing endpoints with a single scan
• Malware identified using signatures, behavior blockers, heuristic analysis
  
• Protection automatically updated with optional Program Advisor Service
• A knowledge base of more than one million trusted or suspicious programs
• Integrated into Check Point Software Blade Architecture
• Flexible licensing options—annual or perpetual
• Centrally managed and deployed
• Activate anti-malware and application control on any Check Point security gateway

Almost all organizations are using cloud computing, and the vast majority are using a hybrid cloud deployment. Private and public cloud deployments have different security requirements, and it is necessary for an organization to be able to enforce consistent security policies across cloud-based environments hosted by multiple vendors. 

The firewall should be easily deployable and scalable in any major cloud environment and enable an organization’s security team to manage all of its security settings from a single console.

I've used the solution for five years.

Check Point is a very stable solution.

It is good in terms of scalability.

From the start, we have been using Check Point.

We would adivse users to install Check Point NGFW. The setup cost is simple and it is not too much. The license fits most budgets.

We also evaluated Cisco and Fortinet.

We are using this product as a firewall which does have the capacity to block the IPS signature as well. 

It is highly accurate for the IPS engine and has the best-in-class log monitoring and report generating facility in the firewall. 

It is easy to manage, as it has a centralized management console. We are using the firewall as a VPN service as well. It is very easy to troubleshoot the issue with the VPN. We are using IPSEC features where we can enable tunnels with the client and we can safely communicate with vendors due to encryption.

Checkpoint NGFW improved the security posture of our network infrastructure to the point where we can use antivirus, IPS, and antibot features to tighten up the security. We can also use URL filtering where we can block malicious URLs in communications. We can easily stop and detect Day-Zero attacks. 

The throughput of the firewall is very big for data transitions. The antivirus also includes DPI (deep packet inspection), which examines the data within the packet itself rather than only looking at packet headers. This enables users to identify, categorize, or block packets with malicious data more effectively. 

The IPS feature is the most valuable feature. We can block zero-day attacks within stipulated time intervals. The up-gradation activities are much simpler when we are dealing with Check Point firewalls. 

If there is a critical issue observed, the Check Point support team can create a custom package that we can deploy on the gateway to mitigate critical issues/bug fixes. 

The support reachability is very promising, as we can directly connect with them via call or chat from the support portal.

Sometimes the KB article does not include all the steps. There is a chance for improvement in the content of global KB articles. It's nearly impossible to add an exception for threat prevention services - such as antivirus and anti-bot. You will be stuck with Indicators of compromise marked as detecting only, caching issues, and random effects. There is no clear way to report incorrect classification to support. 

Sometimes we need to find a resolution by ourselves as the solution's knowledge base is not enough.

I have been using this solution for five years.

The stability is good.

We can easily scale the gateways with a few simple clicks. 

Technical support is great.

Positive

We did use a different solution. Check Point provides better visibility where security is concerned. 

The setup was very straightforward

We can implement it by ourselves.

The ROI is double annually.

It is pretty cheap as far as the setup cost, pricing, and/or licensing are concerned.

We looked at Palo Alto firewalls.

The primary use case is as a perimeter firewall separating different security zones from each other. We separate several zones, such as Internet Of Things (ie. cameras and several sensors), Internet-facing DMZ, internal networks, and guest networks from each other. 

Also, we use the VPN feature to create Site to Site tunnels between branch offices and the headquarters. Threat Prevention features including IPS, Anti-Bot, Threat Emulation, and Threat Extraction and are used to secure our users from being victims of several threats. 

It is hard to say how a product like a firewall is improving our organization. The firewall does what it should. Primarily, the management makes this product great. There is no other product on the market that is nearly as perfect a tool for managing firewall rule bases and I know many of them. Check Point has much fewer vulnerabilities in their products and also is very quick to react to vulnerabilities.

The Threat Extraction software blade feature is the most valuable feature as it extracts any potential harmful content from several kinds of documents, which our users receive via e-mail or download from the Internet. We know, that our users tend to click on everything they get without thinking too much about the consequences. 

The second feature to mention is Threat Emulation, which is basically a sandbox, which runs executables received via email or downloaded from the Internet and creates a verdict if this executable is harmful or not in regards how it behaves on a specific operating system and application.

Unfortunately, the API is not fully complete and also it is not an API which I would refer to as a RESTful API as there are different endpoints for the same entity. For me, a restful API would use one endpoint to handle, for example, host objects and use different HTTP methods to distinguish between different operations. 

I would expect to use the PATCH method to update an object and the PUT method to create one. Currently, there are separate endpoints for these operations and all of them use the POST method. The most important issue with the API is, that there are some endpoints we are missing (for example for managing VPN users).

We have been using this product and its predecessors for about 20 years.

The stability is very good. Sometimes there are issues, however, most of the time, they have no big impact. SecureXL was sometimes a bit of a problem. That said, this has improved in the last few versions.

Check Point offers several possibilities to scale (load sharing, Maestro, and scalable platforms such as 44K or 64K appliances), however, in our case, we just replaced the appliance after a few years. If one needs real scalability, they should take a look at Maestro which is the scaling solution from Check Point.

Technical support can be good or bad. It depends. Sometimes they are really great, and sometimes very annoying. Most of the time we have a good experience.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

It's really simple to set up. You simply install from an ISO with a few questions (ie. mgmt IP address and gateway) and restart with a graphical installation wizard with a few more questions (such as is this a management box or a gateway or a cluster member ASO).

We handled the setup in-house. We have enough knowledge to do that. Our expertise is CCSM level.

We evaluated several competitors such as Cisco, Palo Alto, and Baracuda

Check Point is currently our perimeter firewall at various locations. We use their failover clustering with high availability option, which performs flawlessly. Upgrades are easy to perform and have always worked reliably for us. Technical support is always available to assist with these operations, which makes the process less stressful to the admins. 

We are also using their ISP Redundancy feature, which works as advertised - perfectly! It's easy to implement, especially with the awesome documentation from our engineer. We also use their Remote Access VPN offering and have really seen its value this past year, due to COVID-19. The VPN has been 100% rock solid, especially during the most critical times in our history.

As mentioned in the primary use case question, ISP Redundancy and VPN are the two primary use cases. When the pandemic hit, a sudden shift to a remote workforce was a major requirement for us, and we needed a reliable and stable firewall. Implementing ISP Redundancy helped ensure that, as well as having a tried and tested VPN solution. Upgrades have occurred during this time and manually planned failovers as well; every upgrade and test went smoothly and without issue. The last thing we could afford is an outage.

They offer very scalable solutions to extend compute resources if needed so initial sizing isn't too much of an issue as you can easily add more resources if needed. Reliability is a major factor in any hardware or software solution, and Check Point uses leading-edge hardware, and their software upgrade process is flexible for various deployment requirements. 

Policy configuration has been consistent over the years, so there is not much of a learning curve as upgrades are released. 

Their threat analysis reporting from their management console is very comprehensive and easy to use. Their web-based dashboard is well designed and offers many out-of-the-box reporting, and provides admins extensive customizations.

The pricing is on the high end, specifically with the software licensing, although they are flexible on some levels, and offer hardware buyback options when upgrading. 

The software licensing model is too complicated with all the various tiers of SKUs (i.e. per software blade). They need to simplify this for easier purchasing and renewing. 

Customer support is not always as responsive with solutions as you might need. They do provide on-the-spot assistance when upgrading, which is great. However, there are times when an issue is reported and it may take a week or two before a solution is provided.

We have been using Check Point firewalls for 20+ years. We originally used the Nokia hardware platform, which was not technically NGFW at the time, however, the OS and its configuration have maintained some similarities over the years. It keeps getting better every release.

Lately, stability is 100% reliable. Earlier generation firewalls were a bit unreliable, however, as Check Point acquired third-party hardware. For example, their Nokia acquired security appliances had a firmware that worked, until they started to modify the firmware (IPSO 6.0 was solid, but problems started with our upgrade to R75), then it became less stable; frequent crashes, settings not saving, high availability issues, frequent reboots required.  Eventually, we upgraded to their NGFW offerings.  Their newer hardware, and firmware R77.x was released, and we have been stable ever since.  Upgrades to R80.x have been flawless, HA works as expected, and we have had zero performance issues.

They are very scalable. If you need more computing resources, adding more hardware is easily done.

Customer support is not always as responsive to finding solutions as you might need. They do provide on-the-spot assistance when upgrading, which is great. However, there are times when an issue is reported and it may take a week or two before a solution is provided.

Positive

We have always used Check Point.

Setup was very straightforward and easy. We did have the assistance of our Check Point engineer, which is just awesome.

We implemented through Check Point directly.

I do not measure ROI financially, although personally speaking, we have definitely gotten back every dollar we've spent by having reliable and secure infrastructure.

The setup cost is not a challenge at all. Check Point engineers work directly with you throughout the whole process. The pricing is high, for the hardware and software, although discounts are negotiable. The software blade licensing is broken down into many flavors, depending on your needs. It is very a la carte and provides various product offerings, including endpoint management, VPN, disk encryption, etc.

We did review a few competitors during a possible migration plan. The proof of concept did not yield better results, so we stayed with Check Point. We reviewed Cisco, Palo Alto, and SonicWall.

If you don't need/use their a la carte software blades (FDE, Ransomware, etc.) you can always add on later. They are very accommodating with trial licensing to test in a proof of concept way. If you already have other third-party products that perform those functions, you can bundle Check Point's and save a bit of money consolidating them.