Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) Reviews

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.

I support multiple clients within the UK, the EMEA region, the US, and now in Asia Pacific as well. I specialize in Check Point firewalls. I design and secure their data centers, their on-premises solutions, or their businesses security.

The firewalls are mostly on-premise because most of our clients are financial organizations and they have strict compliance requirements. They feel more secure and have more control when things are on-premise in the data center. However, there are use cases where I have helped them to deploy Check Point solutions in the cloud: AWS, Azure, and in Google as well. But cloud deployments are very much in the early stages for these clients, on a development or testing basis. Most of the production workloads are still on-premise in data centers.

Most of my customers are still using R77.30, and they are on track to upgrade from that to R80, which is the current proposed version by Check Point.

One of our customers has just recently been attacked by malware and internal DoS attacks, and they have a multi-vendor, multi-layer firewall approach. The internal firewalls are Check Point. The great thing about Check Point is that because of its central architecture, you can very quickly pinpoint where the attacks are coming from. It gives you comprehensive reporting when the attacks start and when they've stopped, so you can see the complete, end-to-end picture: where the point of attack is, at what time, and what host. They can track all of that.

However, in parallel, that customer is using other firewalls which have no visibility. One of the main advantages of having Check Point firewall is definitely that it gives you absolute in-depth visibility.

Among the valuable features are antivirus, URL inspection, and anti-malware protection. These are all advanced features.

One of the great advantages of having Check Point as a firewall is that all of these are software blades, so you can buy a license or subscription and enable them and get the security up and running. With other firewalls, it's a completely different agenda, meaning some of them require hardware modules, and some of them have a complex way of adding the licensing, etc. Check Point definitely has a great architecture, where you can just enable the software blades and deploy a secure service. Overall, it provides ease of deployment and ease of use.

The area it needs improvement is the SandBlast Agent. It receives a file, or if it detects a Zero-day attack, it takes the file and analyzes it, either on-premise or in the Check Point Cloud, and then it reports back whether the file is secure or non-secure, or is unknown. That particular area definitely needs a bit more improvement, because there is a delay. That's one of the main complaints for most of our customers. Or if it is quick, then it's very complex. For example, if they have received a file which is "unknown" or has Zero-day attack malware, sometimes it doesn't get analyzed properly or it's locked into the cloud. So there are various small issues with the product that need possible improvement.

The SandBlast product on its own is a very good concept, and it works absolutely brilliantly. However, when you integrate it with existing firewalls, it just doesn't play very well.

The cloud solution is quite straightforward because it seems the SandBlast solution was designed, initially, for cloud deployments, where you've got multiple clouds or multiple vendors, and you are receiving files from different points. And on the cloud edge, for example in AWS, if you have Check Point sitting there, it works very well if you're running a virtual firewall. However, if it's on-premise and it's a dedicated appliance, then the performance is slightly different and the way it works is very different. So where it needs improvement is where it's an appliance-based solution rather than a software or cloud-based solution.

If I am using SandBlast on a virtual appliance — for example, I've got Check Point virtual appliances in AWS, and Azure as well, for a customer — those virtual appliances work absolutely fine as a service, as does SandBlast as a service. However, if it's an appliance, if it's a dedicated firewall on-premise in a data center and you add SandBlast as a software service, the integration is not that straightforward, so the experience is very different. 

It seems like they were possibly built by different teams, independent of each other.

I've been using Check Point firewalls for about 16 years. I am the main network or security lead and I have four other engineers who report to me. They also do design and deployment.

I work with approximately 40 companies that utilize Check Point.

Check Point firewalls are very stable. One good thing about Check Point is that they do rigorous testing internally before releasing updates, which is something I have not found with any other firewall products. With most of the other firewall products, when they release something, it's like the customer becomes the guinea pig for that particular version, whether a minor or a major update. However, with Check Point, you can see all the white papers and what ways they have tested a minor or major upgrade of the software version, and what the performance was like. What are their known issues and is somebody working on them or not?

So the software releases are very stable and you have visibility into how they operate and what the known issues are, so you know whether you should go ahead with them or not. And in case there is a problem, the support is excellent. You can reach out to Check Point and say, "Look, I've done the software upgrade and I'm experiencing these problems. How can I deal with them?" They are there to help you out.

There are times when we have problems in terms of software or hardware defects. We have sustained downtime, but most of the architecture I design is resilient, so if one device is down, the other one is working fine. Then in the background, I or my support team will deal with Check Point directly, to get a replacement. They're definitely quick to respond and very efficient. 

In the past, we had a lot of problems with licensing, specifically, but Check Point has redone the whole way they do licensing. It's very quick now, and very efficient.

Check Point firewalls are extremely scalable. Recently, I deployed Check Point in an AWS cloud solution for one of my clients, and it's been absolutely excellent in handling growth. They've grown from 10,000 users to a million users. The way Check Point has advertised the product, it is supposed to be highly scalable, which means it grows as your demand grows, and that has been the case. 

Recently we have set up a test case where we are moving over management servers from on-premise to a Check Point-provided Infinity cloud solution. We are still at the testing phase but, overall, it's been a great experience so far.

The teams we deal with within Check Point are extremely knowledgeable. They know how to understand the background of the problem, and they're very good about articulating how we deal with the issue, whether it's a minor software upgrade issue or it's a major failure of the hardware itself. They know where to look for the right stuff. The key point is they're very knowledgeable and very technical. And if somebody doesn't have the technical capability, they will definitely help you out to make sure you get to the bottom of the problem.

In the past, most of the customers I've worked with have used different firewall vendors, such as Cisco, Palo Alto, and Juniper.

I've recently seen deployments where customers have tried to move from Cisco ASA to Cisco Firepower and the deployment has gone horribly wrong because the product has not been tested by Cisco very well and is not a mature product. I've gone in and reviewed their business requirements and technical requirements and, based on that, I've recommended Check Point and done the design and deployment. They've absolutely been happy with the solution, how secure and how capable it is.

We use Check Point across multiple types of customers, such as financials, retail, and various other public and private sector organizations. I review their security architecture, which is firewall specific and, based on that, I have recommended Check Point. In most cases, I've managed to convince them to go ahead with Check Point firewalls as a preferred secure firewall solution.

The main reason is that Check Point is far ahead in the game. They're definitely the market leader. They are visionaries when it comes to security. Another reason is that a lot of firewall architecture starts from the firewall itself, which is the local firewall. It can easily be hacked and manipulated. However, the Check Point architecture, out-of-the-box, is very secure. They have a central Management Server and all of the firewalls are managed through that one central point. So in case somebody breaks into your firewall, the firewall is encrypted; they will delete the database. The architecture is secure by default. The good thing is that other firewall vendors have realized this and they've started to copy the same system that Check Point has used for the past 20 years now.

When working with the Check Point team on deployment, they're really helpful and very talented people. When you speak to other firewall vendors, they just think about the firewall from their point of view. The good thing about Check Point engineers, or technical staff, or even management staff, is that they understand what the requirements of business are and how they can improve or align the proposed solution. Overall, Check Point staff are very knowledgeable, they understand different industries, and they understand the product very well. That's definitely a competitive edge compared to other firewalls.

Once the design is done, for something simple the deployment can take half a day, whereas for a complex deployment in a data center it can take about five days.

Our implementation plan is divided into different phases. Phase One might be the physical cabling of the firewall device itself. Phase Two would be the logical setup, which means defining the interfaces and the virtual setup of the firewall itself. The final phase would be to bring it online in parallel with production, in a non-prod service, and test it to ensure it works as per the design.

A customer I'm working with right now was running with Check Point and they wanted to move to Fortinet firewalls. However, when I worked with them on the design to upgrade the existing Check Point firewalls, what we worked out was that even though the Fortinet might have seemed like a cheaper option, it didn't have the security capabilities that Check Point is offering. On that basis, the customer signed off on a project for upgrading their existing firewalls, on-premise and cloud, from R77.30 to R80.10.

It can be expensive, but it's value for money. What you pay for is what you get. You can go down in price and buy some cheap firewalls, but you're not going to get great support and you're not going to get the level of protection you need. With Check Point you get all of that.

With Juniper, one of the biggest downsides is support. The support portal is slow and I won't say the staff is competent in terms of understanding. They're very disconnected internally. What I mean is that the team working on the software development of the firewall has no interface with the support teams that are handling day-to-day TAC cases. They definitely struggle when it comes to understanding challenges, problems, and incidents with the firewalls.

In the past, Juniper firewalls were good, but recently the security offering has just not been there. They don't have anything like SandBlast from Check Point. They don't have up-to-date Zero-day attacks control. They're still running a very old architecture. They can do things like antivirus and URL proxy, but those are very simple features. They have none of the advanced feature set that Check Point has.

Palo Alto is very competitive with Check Point when it comes to security. However, one of the challenges with Palo Alto is that, overall, the solution can be extremely complex and expensive. That is one thing I've heard from customers again and again. Either they have existing Palo Altos or they plan to go to Palo Alto, but when they do a comparison with Check Point, what they find is that the overall value with Check Point is much greater than with Palo Alto firewalls.

If you're looking to implement Check Point as a security solution, definitely do your homework. Do some research, not just in terms of firewalls, but overall security architecture. Which ones are the leaders in the field? Which ones are there to deliver what they promise? And overall, how does the architecture work? Is it secure or not? And does it come from a team that understands how to support the solution itself? Are they consistent? Look at their track record for the past 10 or 15 years, or are they a new player? If they are, you don't know whether they're going to stay in the game or not. A good thing about Check Point is that its core product is security. They've been doing it day in and day out. You know they're there to stay in the game. You can trust them.

Check Point is a proven solution. A lot of customers and clients already rely on it. And for the Next Generation Firewalls, they're coming up with new features as security threats become known.

If somebody wants a secure and stable environment, Check Point is definitely the leader to go to; definitely the number-one choice. It's not only what it says on the box. In reality, I've worked with hundreds of banks and they're happy with the product because it works; in practice, it works. That's the main thing.

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.

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.

We use it for VSX virtualization and we use it for normal firewall functions as well as NAT. And we use it for VPN. We don't use a mobile client, we just use the VPN for mobile users.

We are able to virtualize about four firewalls on one machine. Before, we needed to have four firewall hardware devices, physical devices, from Cisco. We had four appliances, but now, with Check Point, we just have one. We can manage them, we can integrate them, and we can increase connections using one and the other. It has broken down connection complexities into just a GUI.

Also, previously we had downtime due to memory saturation with our old firewalls. We were using Cisco ASA before. During peak periods, CPU utilization was high. Immediately, when we switched to Check Point, that was the first thing we started monitoring. What is the CPU utilization on the device? We observed that CPU utilization stayed around 30 percent, as compared to 70 percent with the Cisco we had before, although it was an old-generation Cisco. Now, at worst, CPU utilization goes to 35 percent. That gives us confidence in the device. 

In addition, the way Check Point built their solution, there is a Management Server that you do your administration on. You have the main security gateway, so it's like they broke them down into two devices. Previously, on the Cisco, everything was in one box: both the management and the gateway were in one box. With Check Point breaking it into two boxes, if there's a failure point, you know it's either in the management or the security gateway. The management is segmented from the main security gateway. If the security gateway is not functioning properly, we know that we have to isolate the security gateway and find out what the problem is. Or if the management is not coming up or is not sending the rules to the security gateway, we know there's something wrong with it so we isolate it and treat it differently. Just that ability to break them down into different parts, isolating them and isolating problems, is a really nice concept.

And with the security gateway there are two devices, so there's also a failover.

• The most valuable feature for us is the VSX, the virtualization.
• The GUI is also better than what we had previously.
• The third feature is basic IP rules, which are more straightforward.
• And let's not forget the VPN.

The way we use the VPN is usually for partners to connect with. We want a secure connection between our bank and other enterprises so we use the VPN for them. Also, when we want to secure a connection to our staff workstations, when employees want to work from home, we use a VPN. That has been a very crucial feature because of COVID-19. A lot of our people needed to work remotely.

The VPN part was actually one of the most complex parts for us. It was not easy for us to switch from Cisco, because of one particular part of the integration: connecting the Check Point device to an Entrust server. Entrust is a solution that provides two-factor authentication. We got around it by using another server, a solution called RADIUS.

It was very difficult to integrate the VPN. Until now, we still don't know why it didn't work. With our previous environment, Cisco, it worked seamlessly. We could connect an Active Directory server to a two-factor authentication server, and that to the firewall. But when we came onboard with Check Point, the point-of-sale said it's possible for you to use what you have on your old infrastructure. We tried with the same configurations, and we even invited the vendor that provided the stuff for us, but we were not able to go about it. At the end of day they had to use a different two-FA solution. I don't if Check Point has a limitation in connecting with other two-FAs. Maybe it only connects with Microsoft two-FA or Google two-FA or some proprietary two-FA. They could work on this issue to make it easier.

Apart from that, we are coming from something that was not so good to something that is much better.

I have been using the Check Point Next Generation Firewall for 10 months.

The stability of Check Point's firewall, for what we use it for now, is pretty good. Especially, with the licensing of blades and the way they script it down into different managers. You have a part that manages blades, you have the part that manages NAT, and you have the part that manages identity. The VSX is another one on its own. So it is very stable for us.

When we add more load to it, when we go full-blown with what we want to use the device for, that will be a really good test of strength for the device. But for now the stability is top-notch.

They scale well.

All information passes through the firewall. We have about 8,000-plus users, including communicating with third-party or the networks of other enterprises that we do business with.

We've not used technical support. We asked our questions of the vendor that deployed and he was quite free and open in providing solutions. Anytime we call him we can ask. He was like our own local support.

There is also a Check Point community, although we've not really been active there, but you can go and ask questions there too, apart from support.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

It took a while about a month, but it was not because of the complexity. It was because we gave them what we already have on the ground. We were on Cisco before and they had to come up with a replica of the configurations for Check Point. When they got back to us we had to make some corrections, and there was some back-and-forth before everything finally stabilized.

Four our day-to-day administrative work, we have about four people involved.

We used a Check Point partner for the installation. I was involved in the deployment, meaning that while they were deploying I was there. They even took us through some training.

We have surely seen ROI compared to the other vendors I mentioned, in terms of costs. And we tested all the firewall features to see if it is doing what it says can do. And so far so good, it's excellent. It's a good return.

Check Point offers good solutions, but it won't kill your budget.

Going into Next-Generation firewalls, you should know what the different blades are for, and when you want to buy a solution, know what you want to use that solution for. If it's for your normal IP rule set, for identity awareness, content awareness, for VPN, or for NAT, know the blades you want. Every solution or every feature of the firewall has license blades. If you want to activate a feature to see how that feature handles the kind of work you give, and it handles it pretty well, you can then move to other features.

We evaluated Palo Alto, Fortinet FortiGate, and Cisco FirePOWER.

Check Point was new to the market so we had to ask questions among other users. "How is this solution? Is it fine?" We got some top users, some top enterprises, that said, "Yes, we've been using it for a while and it's not bad. It's actually great." So we said, "Okay, let's go ahead."

I would recommend going into Check Point solutions. Although Check Point has the option of implementing your firewall on a server, I would advise implementing it on a perimeter device because servers have latency. So deploy it on a dedicated device. Carry out a survey to find out if the device can handle the kind of workload you need to put through it.

Also, make it a redundant solution, apart from the Management Server, which can be just one device. Although I should note that up until now, we have not had anything like that.

I had 3200 appliances deployed in my company where we had two CMSs. We had multiple VSXs on those appliances due to the main firewall that we had on the VLAN. We also had an external firewall on the VLAN, which were used to monitor and allow the traffic within the network. That is how we were using it.

They have a new R81 in place. Currently, they also have R75 deployed in the environment, but they are planning to upgrade to R80.20 because that particular firewall has very high CPU utilization and there is no more support for R75. 

I like that it first checks the SAM database. If there is any suspicious traffic, then you can block that critical traffic in the SAM database instead of creating a rule on the firewall, then pushing that out, which takes time. 

The Anti-Spoofing has the ability to monitor the interfaces. Suppose any spoofed IP addresses are coming from an external interface, it won't allow them. It will drop that traffic. You have two options with the Anti-Spoofing: prevent or detect. If any kind of spoof traffic is coming through the external interface, we can prevent that. 

I like the Check Point SandBlast, which is also the new technology that I like, because it mitigates the zero-day attacks. I haven't worked on SandBlast, but I did have a chance to do the certification two years back, so I have sound knowledge on SandBlast. We can deploy it as a SandBlast appliance or use it along with the Check Point Firewall to forward the traffic to the SandBlast Cloud.

Working on Check Point for me looks simple. For the user or anyone else who is using Check Point, they are more into the GUI stuff. Check Point has its SmartConsole. On the console, you have to log into the MDS or CMS. Then, from there, you have to go onto that particular firewall and put in the changes. If the management console could be integrated onto the GUI itself, that would be one thing that I would recommend.

The ability for the multiple administrators to not do changes was fixed in R80.

I just changed companies six months back. I have been using Check Point for around two and a half years. I was working on the Check Point technologies in my previous company. I did the implementation of Check Point and was also monitoring the Check Point Firewall in my last company during firewall upgrades.

We had two Check Point Firewalls deploy in the HA. There was one particular change that we did regarding the FQDN objects. However, after deploying this new change, which already had multiple FQDN objects, the behavior of the firewall was changed in terms of the live traffic. Because after deploying the critical chain, the users were facing intermittent Skype and Office 365 issues. We checked the performance of the Check Point, which also decreased due to the FQDN objects that were pushed onto the firewall. Therefore, we had to reverse back the change in order to increase the performance, because it was utilizing 80 or 90 percent of it. Once we reversed that particular change, then it was working fine.

These firewalls are stable. The customer is looking forward to upgrading to the latest version of Check Point.

It is scalable.

The entire company network resides behind these particular firewalls. All of the users, if they wanted to go out onto the Internet, have to go through this firewall.

There are around five to eight people who worked for my team. We monitored the firewall. In case of issues, we would then go a call with the customer and troubleshoot that issue.

Sometimes, I faced issues while troubleshooting. In those cases, I did have to contact Check Point's technical support because some of those issues were complex. 

I would give the technical support a four out of five. They would get on the call and try to resolve that issue as soon as possible. 

Initially, I was working on the Cisco ASA Firewall, then I got an opportunity to work on the Check Point Firewall. The main difference is regarding the architecture. Check Point has three-tier architecture, whereas ASA doesn't have that architecture so you have to deploy every rule on the firewall manually. With Check Point, you have a management server and you can have that policy package pushed onto the other firewall, which is one of the key features of Check Point: You don't have to deploy every tool on the firewall manually. We can just push that particular policy package onto the new firewall based on global rules that we have Check Point. 

Every time, I had to deploy all of the rules and basic connectivity, SSH and SNMP management, on the ASA Firewall. Whereas, in Check Point, I can just go onto the global rules and put that policy onto the Check Point Firewall, then it will have all those global rules required in the company.

Check Point also has the Identity Awareness feature, which is using a captive portal. This is something good which I like. 

It was pretty easy and straightforward for me to deploy these firewalls.

It took around the 15 days to do the initial deployment and get the basic connectivity to the Check Point Firewalls. We had to send a field engineer to do the cabling and everything, like the data connectivity. It takes time to do all the network, cabling, etc. Once the basic connectivity is established, then we can move ahead with the implementation of the rules on the firewall. The company had an initial set of rules to follow for the setup.

We initially opened a case regarding the upgrade. Check Point's technical support was there on the call because the upgrade was going from version R77 to R81.10. This was a major update for the entire network, and they were there supporting us in case of any issues.

The customer feels more secure because they have two layers of security and comfortable working with this particular Check Point Firewall because they previously used Check Point R75. 

Pricing is fine. 

We had to get separate licenses for the different blades. It would be nice to have a feature where we can get the multiple licenses all-in-one instead. 

The licensing feature is good for the Check Point. It attaches to the management IP address of the central management server. So, you can remove that particular IP and then use that license on another device on some other firewall, if you want.

Compared to the Cisco ASA Firewall, the Check Point Firewall makes your work easier because you're not deploying the firewall, then pushing the policy, which takes time. Initially, when I was working with the ASA Firewall, we used to implement the firewall, then we used to hand it over to operations for the maintenance. So, I had to manually implement all of these rules, etc. 

When I learned about Check Point and had basic training for it, I got to know the architecture was different for the Check Point Firewall. You can just have a policy package and deploy that policy package on any of the firewalls that you want. It already has that particular set of rules, which makes your life easier while implementing the rules on the firewall, e.g., if there are multiple firewalls on the network that should have the same policy.

Anyone who is new to Check Point Firewalls should have the basic understanding and training so it becomes easy to deploy and implement. You can go onto YouTube and find various training videos regarding Check Point, where you can get a basic understanding of the Check Point Firewall.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

For the SMB appliances, the use case is tricky because I don't actually like them too much. If you have a very small branch office, you could use one of them, but in that case I would just go for the lowest version of the full GAiA models. But for small locations that are not that important, it is possible to use one of the SMB appliances, the 1400 or 1500 series. 

The full GAiA models, starting with the 3200 and up to the chassis, are the ones we work with the most, and you can use them in almost every environment that you want to secure, from Layer 4  to Layer 7. The only reason to go higher is if they don't perform well enough, and then you go to the chassis which are for really big data centers that need to be secure.

About a year or a year-and-a-half ago, they introduced the Maestro solution, which gives you the flexibility of using the normal gateways in a way that you can extend them really easily, without switching to the chassis. You can just plug more and more gateways into the Maestro solution.

It's difficult to say how these firewalls have improved our clients' companies because a firewall isn't meant to improve things, it's meant to make them more secure. Nine times out of 10, it's going to give you something that the end-users aren't so happy with. But Check Point Next Generation Firewalls improve security and, indirectly, they improve the way users work. They can access practically everything on the internet without being concerned about what's going to happen. They give users more confidence when doing something, without having to worry about the consequences because the gateway is going to help them out where needed, preventing malicious stuff.

The feature I like the most is their central management, the Smart controller which you can use to manage all the firewalls from one location. You can get practically all information — but not all the information, because not everything has been migrated from the previous SmartDashboard version into the SmartConsole. Being able to access almost everything in one location — manage all your gateways and get all your logs — for me, is the best feature to work with. 

As for the security features, that depends a bit on what you're doing with it, and what your goal is. But they're all very good for application URL filtering. Threat Prevention and Threat Extraction are also great, especially the Threat Extraction. It's very nice because your end-user doesn't have to wait for the file that he's downloading to see if it's infected, if it's malware or not. It gives him a plain text version without active content, and he can start working. And if he needs the actual version, it will be available a few minutes later to download, if it isn't infected. That's a great feature. 

Anti-Bot also is also very nice because if a PC from an end-user gets infected, it stops it from communicating with its command and control, and you get notification that there is an infected computer.

It's difficult to distinguish which feature is best, because they're all good. It just depends on what your goals are. As a partner, we are implementing all of them, and which ones we prioritize depends on the client's needs and which is the best for them. For me, they're all very good.

The MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) may not be the greatest, and the full proxy that you can activate instead of just doing application control is also not the greatest, but they don't even recommend using those. They're just available if you want.

But the biggest improvement they could make is having one software to install on all three levels of their products, so that the SMBs, the normal models, and the chassis would all run the same software. Now, while there is central management, everything that has to be configured on the gateway itself works differently on the three kinds of devices. That is a bit hard because you have to update your skills on all three.

A practical example is that I have a client that I run scripts for to get information from 40-plus firewalls. That client is thinking about refreshing and there may be SMB appliances in the roll-out that don't run those scripts. That would make my job a lot harder. So the best improvement would be standard software on all their devices.

I started working with Check Point firewalls in 1999, so it's been about 20 years. In the last year I have worked with all the SMB appliances, through the full GAiA and up to the 64000 series.

There's not much difference between a Check Point 3200 and a 5200 because they're running the same OS. There are just performance differences. So I can't say I've worked on every model, because I don't always check the model when I come to a client. But I've worked on every model that runs different software. I've worked with all three kinds of software that are used by Check Point.

The SMBs have room for improvement in stability. They're not as stable as they could be.

The chassis are great, but they are running behind. Maybe "running behind" is an overstatement, but the roll-out of new features on them is really slow because they want them to be tested and tested and tested. The clients installing these chassis are large banks or very large customers that can't have any downtime whatsoever, so it's normal that they test them more thoroughly. 

For the mainstream models, we do run into bugs on a regular basis, but they're mostly not showstoppers. You can run into a bug, but either there's a possible work-around or it doesn't impact things so much that there are huge problems for the client.

The SMBs are not scalable. New devices come out from time to time that are more performant. The mainstream devices are also not scalable except if you go with the Maestro version, and then you can just plug in an extra firewall and it scales up. With the chassis you just plug in an extra blade and it scales up also. So the Maestro and the chassis are very scalable, but for the other models it comes down to buying new boxes if the current ones aren't sufficient anymore.

Check Point support is a very difficult question because not so long ago I had a major complaint with Check Point about their support. Now, they give us much better support because we have the highest level of partnership. They recognize that the people from our team, in particular, are very skilled, so we don't go to first-level support anymore. The moment we open a ticket, we get tier-three support, and that is good.

But we haven't had this privilege for that long and, in the past, support could be a bit tricky. If we got a tier-one engineer it could be okay for support that wasn't urgent but if we were doing an implementation, especially since we had a lot of experience, they were mostly asking questions about things that we had already checked. Often, we had more knowledge than they did.

For us, it's great that we now immediately get access to tier-three. I just wrote an email to the support manager this morning about an issue we had last night, and I told him the support was great; no complaints anymore. It took a while, but now it's good. I can't complain anymore.

It depends on the partnership you have with Check Point. If you're a lower-level partner, you have to go through the steps and it takes a bit of time. If you're working in a company that has a good partnership and you can negotiate some things, then support is good and you get very good people on the line.

The initial setup of these firewalls is fairly straightforward for me, but they're not the easiest ones to learn and to set up. But I've been working with Check Points for 20 years. So if you're a new user, I wouldn't say it's easy. If you have experience, it's not really that difficult. But the learning curve is higher than some of the competitors.

The time for deployment depends on the features you want to enable on the firewall and the environment you want to put it in. If it's a branch office with a small network, a DMZ and an internet connection, that would take half a day or a day. It also depends though on if it is a completely new installation where you also have to install a Management Server. On average, we count on about one day per gateway and one day for the management, but it depends on the complexity of the environment, of course.

Our implementation strategy differs per client, and it even differs by the engineer who does it because everyone has his own skills and tricks from the past that they're using. But a uniform implementation approach, especially for different clients, is very difficult to do because every firewall is a complex product. You can't do for client A what you're going to do for client B.

If it's an installation we go the standard route, with a high-level design and get it approved by the clients. Then we go for the low-level design and implementation. A standard implementation is a clustered environment with a separate Management Server. We almost never deploy one gateway, so one cluster with a separate Management Server is the most basic level. We usually set up the management on a virtual system, not an appliance, and we try to go for appliances for the gateways, depending a bit on the customer's needs; it could be virtual.

Make sure you get the correct license. For instance, I did an audit for one of our clients recently and I saw that they always were buying the most expensive license and not using the features that were included in it. That's one thing to look at: If you're not going to use some features, don't buy the license related to those and go for a cheaper license. 

Also, negotiate. There's always room for discounts.

You get licensing bundles, so depending on which features you want to activate, your license is going to be more expensive. Some things, like Threat Extraction and Threat Emulation, require subscriptions. They don't come with a standard firewall. 

I'm not a licensing expert, but as far as I know there's the standard firewall, the Next Generation Firewall, and then the Next Generation Threat Prevention license. The price goes up in those bundles.

Another vendor I work with and have the most knowledge about, when compared to Check Point, is Palo Alto. They force you to work a bit more with applications instead of ports, although that's not something Check Point cannot do. 

The central management is different for Palo Alto. You can install it, but it doesn't work the way it works with Check Point. I like both. I like that with the Palo Alto you just go to a web browser and can configure the firewall all the way, but it's also easy to have the SmartConsole from Check Point where you can manage multiple devices. Palo Alto doesn't really have that. They have a central manager where you can get logs and where you can distribute some policies, but it doesn't work the way Check Point's central management does.

Both have their pros and cons. It depends on how you like to work. I like working with both of them. It's a bit different, but in terms of security and features, I don't think they're that different. It's just another way of working.

Make sure you have a good partner doing Check Point work for you because, as a direct client, it's very hard to get the necessary skills in-house, unless you're a very big company. Contact Check Point and ask them which partner they recommend and go that route. Don't try to do it yourself. The firewall is too complex to set up and maintain yourself, without the assistance of people who do it every day.

Learn and get experience with it. Don't be overwhelmed. When you start with it all the features and all the tips and tricks that you need to know to maintain it, it can be overwhelming. Like I said, the learning curve is very steep, and when you start with it, it's going to look like, "Whoa, this is impossible." But stick with it and when you get some experience it's going to be okay. It's a difficult product, but once you get the hang of it, it's one that's really nice to work with. We still run into issues from time to time, but Check Point products are very manageable and fun to work with. Check Point is my favorite vendor. I like working with it a lot.

I would rate Check Point's mainstream solutions at eight or nine out of 10, and the same for the chassis. I would rate the SMBs around a six. I don't really like those too much. Overall, Check Point is an eight, because most people are going for the mainstream solutions and those are very good.