Check Point Remote Access VPN Reviews

I use Remote Access VPN for clientless applications, setting up WireGuard tunnels, and WireGuard VPN as a service. It provides remote access for SIP setups, allowing users to connect securely through a VPN.

The most valuable features include application access, clientless application access, and WireGuard. These features make it easy to deploy and offer a user-friendly interface. The complexity is hidden within a full mesh network, allowing seamless user-to-application connectivity with minimal delay.

Automations for cloud integrations need to be expanded, and currently, developers have to manually configure APIs, which is not developer-centric. Improving this process could enhance the solution's scalability and efficiency.

I have used Check Point Remote Access VPN for two and a half years.

Some connectivity issues arise occasionally, especially when accessing the internet or using other applications. The installed client sometimes reconnects, possibly due to conflicts with existing VPN solutions.

The solution is extremely scalable, with an eight out of ten rating due to its mesh network and ability to build WireGuard tunnels. However, additional automation is required to enhance its enterprise features.

Customer service is excellent. Support is integrated into the product, making it easy to access without needing to search for contact information. There is an icon in the portal for online support, and Check Point local support promptly replies to queries.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the initial setup of Check Point Remote Access VPN as ten because it is super easy to set up.

The pricing is rated eight to 8.5 out of ten. The costs increase with the purchase of advanced features. Licensing issues need to be sorted as different features require separate licenses.

The best solution for small to medium businesses. Licensing issues need to be sorted out. For example, features like CASB and browser security should be bundled. Having automations will help scale to other scenarios.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

For remote work, Check Point Remote Access VPN connects, creates the site, and gathers information about the site in terms of the VPN domain, the public IP at that time, and so on.

The Check Point products provide solid detection and advanced malware protection, which helps safeguard the organization’s security infrastructure. The platform offers essential features like sandboxing that perform well in threat detection.

The advanced malware protection and the sandboxing features are very valuable as they perform well, with detection being very high. Additionally, the panel features are also solid.

There are some issues with the Check Point VPN, such as its complexity compared to other VPN clients. Another downside is related to performance, which lags behind similarly priced products like those from Palo Alto. The platform becomes layered with add-ons, moving away from its original simplicity, which poses a problem.

I have been using Check Point since version 4.1, which amounts to about 15 years.

I rate the stability of Check Point Remote Access VPN as a seven out of ten. I experienced an issue when there was a recent upgrade to address a vulnerability that required the use of both a VPN user and a password along with a certificate or another form of identity confirmation. This was not mentioned in the upgrade notes, which initially caused some problems.

The scalability of Check Point Remote Access VPN is decent. On a scale of one to ten, I rate it a seven.

Check Point's support has always been great. They are very responsive, and we always get technically capable people. I would rate their support a nine or nine point five out of ten.

Positive

I have worked with multiple vendors, including Palo Alto and Fortinet.

For someone new to Check Point products or coming from managing other products, the setup can be difficult. However, for someone familiar with Check Point, the setup hasn't changed much over the years.

I am on the technical side and do not typically consider the business returns or ROI of the product.

I am not familiar with the exact pricing details. However, the pricing for the basic remote access VPN is a lot less than that of other vendors, and it comes with many features within the basic package.

I have compared Check Point with Palo Alto. Palo Alto is more GUI-based, which makes it easier to use, but it requires more configuration knowledge.

For regular users, Check Point firewalls are easier to configure compared to Palo Alto's. In terms of detection rates and performance, both Check Point and Palo Alto are very good.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use Check PointVPN to securely connect to our main office systems, which are behind a firewall. This ensures that all incoming and outgoing traffic is encrypted and secure.

The security of the solution is a good feature, the stability is a valuable feature, and the customization is also a nice feature.

The provisioning of VPN users has room for improvement.

The solution can improve by providing an option to centrally manage and upgrade client applications on a PC.

I have been using the solution for five years.

We found the previous checkpoint version to be quite unstable, as it would occasionally cause issues with the VPN caching every two months. However, we have since updated the solution and the stability has improved significantly, with no further occurrences of this issue.

The solution is licensed-based, so to scale up we only need to add more licenses.

The tech support isn't great. They take a long time to get to our ticket. Their initial response was fast, but after we provided the information they asked for, there was a month of silence before we updated the ticket again. Ultimately, the problem was resolved with newer versions without any response from tech support.

Neutral

I previously used Mikro Tik VPN which is cheap and includes enterprise features but is hard to configure.

The initial setup is straightforward if we are knowledgeable about the task at hand. However, it is recommended to consider a few things and to have a reliable technical support team to assist with the initial deployment. For a small company, the first step is relatively straightforward. However, if we are looking to scale up, we may need to enlist the help of a consultant to properly configure the necessary parameters, as there are many of them to consider.

Once we have configured users, access lists, written firewall rules, and deployed clients to endpoints, the next step is to educate employees on how to use the solution.

On average the deployment took around two weeks to configure all the certificates. This included preparing laptops and PCs. For just the VPN with central management deployment, it would take one week.

Our deployment was completed by two people.

I give the price of the solution a five out of ten. 

We have a subscription-based license.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

We have 250 people using the solution in our organization.

Managing updates to endpoints can be a bit of a hassle, but there isn't much maintenance required.

It allows staff to work from home, especially now during COVID-19. You can access it from any location, and it does not require technical knowledge. 

If any problem occurs, we are unable to work. An access to VPN enabled organization needs to improve by way of getting work done from any location in order to improve submission of work on time.

The solution is easy to install, centrally managed, and stable, with good technical support and a straightforward setup. It integrates extremely well with the Check Point Firewall.

A saving password option might save time for continuous disconnection to the server due to internet fluctuation problems. 

They need to increase their timeout. Right now, it will fail after ten seconds, however, it shouldn't fail until after 20 seconds. 

If you don't get on your phone right away and check on your authentications, it will kick you out. 

In an environment with multiple cluster checkpoints, the global properties common to all clusters in some cases give problems. 

The interface needs improvement. When you need to create something, you have to go through a lot of steps. It needs to be simplified.

I've used the solution for more than three years.

The solution's stability is reasonable.

The scalability of the product is reasonable.

We've had a satisfactory experience with technical support.

We did not previously use a different solution.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We used a vendor to set up the solution. 

We've seen a 100% ROI.

The product is offered at a reasonable cost.

We did look at other solutions before choosing this product. 

We use Check Point Remote Access VPN to provide access to employees and to the company resources, especially now that most people are working from home. That's the main use. We also use it for specific companies that give us remote support to some applications. They access our company servers and resources. We're using Remote Access VPN with a specific profile for them that only gives access to some.

We have two environments. Our firewalls and our perimeter firewalls are Check Point. The firewall connects to the internet and those firewalls are the ones that the people connect to for the Remote VPN. We have the Blade enabled and they access the company resources as if they were working at the office.

Remote Access VPN allows users to work from home very easily. They are very happy with the way they log in with RSA. That's why we use the Foo. It's very stable. We didn't have any issues.

Compared to Pulse Secure, Check Point saves us a couple of hours a week. It's easier to reverse when we have issues. At the moment, most of our company still uses Pulse Secure. But a year ago, we also started deploying some people on Check Point so that we have another option. If we don't want to renew with Pulse Secure the client says we can migrate everyone to Check Point as we already have some people working on the Check Point VPN. 20% of the company uses the Check Point VPN and the rest uses Pulse Secure, which is our main VPN, which is around 100 people.

The biggest advantage of Check Point Remote Access VPN is that we already use the Check Point firewall. We only needed to enable the feature and do the configuration in order to enable the VPN feature. We didn't need to buy or manage new hardware. This was a big advantage. 

The integration with two-factor authentication for Remote Access users is another valuable feature. In our case we use RSA.

Those two are the most valuable aspects that we have on the solution. It also gives us the possibility to securely connect to the company resources, without Check Point security measures.

Another good thing we like is that we already have all the logs from the firewall on the SmartPortal as the remote VPN also integrates into the firewall. We can see all the logs on the same tool because we also have a fully secure solution for Remote Access VPN. For full security, we need to manage the different hardware from the firewalls and the logs that are not in the same place. This is another valuable aspect of this solution. 

Having access to those logs affects our security operations because if a user calls the support but does not have access to the VPN, we can see on the same tool on the SmartPortal. If he's being blocked on the firewall policy, you can see it with the VPN profile.

If the user is using Foo, we need to go to the Check Point firewall to see the Check Point firewall log on the perimeter firewall, to see if the user is crossing the firewall to get the Foo. Then we need to go to the supplier to see that the logs are there. So we need to go to two places.

We are very happy with the Windows client. You log in with the VPN for the full client, you do the log in there. But for Linux machines, they don't have a full client to install. It is important because we have some users that use Linux and they don't have a specific application from Check Point to use. That is something that could be improved. 

I have been using Check Point Remote Access VPN for around one year. 

We don't have any stability issues.

It is very scalable in a way that we can share the configuration for Remote VPN amongst our perimeter firewall so we can implement the Remote VPN with the same profiles and the same configuration easily on all of them. It's very scalable.

We are still studying the possibility of migrating everyone to Check Point VPN, but a decision has to be made because we still have a lot of people using Pulse Secure.

We haven't used technical support specifically for Remote Access VPN. We use it for other products, but not for this one. In general, their support is good, especially if you work with the Israel team. Because of the time zones, we try to call when they are available. The support is usually in. The other ones are also good but in most cases, the Israel team is better.

Our team finds that Pulse Security is a bit difficult to configure. It's not very straightforward. We are used to it now. Management is easier on Check Point. Our managers wanted us to have to study some alternatives to Pulse Secure so that if the price was too high, or if we wanted to move to another solution, we would already have an idea about other solutions. We chose Check Point as we already had the firewall. It has worked well until now. We already have some people using the Check Point VPN and we are ready to move everyone. 

Pulse Secure was more difficult because of all the things that you need to for the setup. You need to do four or five things to set up a profile and some of them don't make any sense. It's difficult for a person that's never used Pulse to understand the philosophy of the configuration and to create different profiles. It's not very straightforward.

The initial setup was straightforward, especially because we already have the firewall implemented. So we only needed to enable the features and do some configurations, which were not hard to do. They were really fit. 

It took two days. We did our own thing. The implementation strategy was to first have only two or three users from the IT team to test it. Then we allowed it to extend to some teams.

Two team members did the deployment. 

We require three full-time network security engineers for maintenance. We manage all the solutions on the security side of our company. Specifically Remote Access VPN requires three hours of maintenance a week.

The return on investment is that we have a stable VPN solution to provide our employees, which is very important. Especially now with the virus, we have more than 50% of people working from home and using the VPN solutions. Our return on investment is the ability to allow people to work remotely in a secure way and a stable VPN.

As far as I'm aware, Check Point is on the same line of pricing with Pulse at the moment. It's not any different. It is in line with the competition. There are no additional costs that I'm aware of. 

It's not hard to deploy the solution. Remote Access VPN is easier to deploy than some other solutions like Pulse Secure.

If you already have a Check Point firewall, this remote solution is a win-win because you don't need to buy, manage, or do a hardware refresh when you enter the end of life. You will have centralized logs on the same tools. If you have a Check Point firewall, this solution is the best for you.

I would rate Check Point Remote Access VPN a nine out of ten. 

It works very well. I would say it's almost the perfect solution. As far as I'm aware, it's one of the oldest solutions from Check Point. So it's very, very stable. They have a lot of years of working with it.

In our current dynamic, we are using this solution to provide access to data and some business applications over the internet.

Our users find the interface very comfortable to use.

There is always room for innovation and the addition of new features.

We have been using this VPN for more than ten years.

With respect to stability, Check Point has been running smoothly and we haven't had any issues.

We have about 500 people using this solution in our company during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to that, we had an average of 100 daily users.

We are satisfied with the support.

We are always searching to see if there is anything new in the market.

Currently, Check Point is meeting all of our requirements. That said, there is always a chance of innovation and something new.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

A lot of our clients are complimentary companies, like the electrical company. They need Check Point Remote Access VPN, or even another similar solution. I tell them that I already have the VPN solution in our company.

In terms of improving the service, I think they could add more features, like the security to block off the doors, or create another hatch, something like this. They could make the features safer, add malware to make my mail and the Kryon system safer and to protect data at an earlier stage.

I have been using Check Point for about one year.

I have not heard any complaints from the clients regarding its stability. I think it's stable for them.

Not all of our clients who use Check Point VPN are in Thailand. Some government agencies, like the Electric City Company, are in Thailand. They use it formally. Their IT and telecom departments, those who require a secure network, are using it.

I have not contacted customer support yet because I take care of any issues from here. That's why I don't have their programming disk because I take care of it myself, including the configuration and the DSL in Check Point.

We still use other products.

The initial setup is not complex. Plus, we've got the Kryon system. So these systems make it easier for the user. We have known this product for a while, that's why it's not a problem to configure the system.

I don't have any advice yet.

On a scale of one to ten, I'd give Check Point Remote Access VPN a seven.

The differentiator for this solution is the management interface that we find very good and provides a single view for all endpoints. The solution offers SmartLog that allows quick searches. The compliance modules are also very interesting.

I cannot see the full effect of the antibot solution because it relies on having access to the DNS queries, which might not go through the Check Point firewall when you're using it for perimeter networks. In this case Check Point will not identify the actual source of the DNS queries associated with antibot activity. This may be related to the customer architecture, however, and not due to product limitation. I don't know if it can be improved on the Check Point side or not.

The solution should allow for the automatic identification of destinations. 

We have a URL qualification on the on-premises deployment model; this should also be the case on the cloud. The automatic classification should be done by the cloud team instead of having to specify or subscribe to a RSS for the information, we should be able to have an object that represents such cloud services. It's possible that Check Point already allows for this, but if they don't they should.

We've been using the solution for about 20 years.

The solution is very stable.

The stability depends on the setup. If the solution resides on a specific appliance, it is not scalable. It has a fixed capacity. However, if you move it onto different environments, cloud environments, it will become scalable. Right now, we have about 4,000 users in the current network and about 500 remote access users.

Technical support is reasonable. It depends on the level of support you are willing to pay for, however. You can choose to have a company working for you with intermediate support with Check Point, or you can choose to have direct advanced support.

The initial setup has a moderate amount of complexity. It's acceptable. However, the graphical display of the user chart of network usage, and the ability to zero in on the current graphics could be improved.

We currently only use the on-premises deployment model, although we may extend into the cloud in the future. We're aware of the cloud's capabilities, but we're not using it because we don't have a large infrastructure expression there.

In terms of advice, I'd suggest that others implementing the solution make sure training happens on their teams. Most products can have lots of features, but if you do not have proper knowledge, you will not be able to make use of those features.

I'm very satisfied with this solution; I'd rate it eight out of ten.