Check Point Security Management Reviews

With Security Management solution, we can manage and distribute security policies to firewall gateways. In large environment where there are dozens of Check Point appliances from Headquarter to branches, I deployed the Security Management with thousands of rules for an enterprise. I created different security packages for each gateway/cluster pair for administration purpose while maintaining separation and ease of policy installation. With every change request, we just need to configure the relating package and install to right gateways. Besides log dashboard in smartconsole is very useful and convenient for monitoring and tracking. It provides intuitive interface to search log, operation to filter is very to understand

With Check Point Security Management, we can:

- Manage and configure cluster for Check Point Gateways. Define security zones (internal, dmz, external) on interfaces.

- Add, modify, delete security rules, objects and install to gateways.

- Activate or de-activate blades like Mobile Access, IPS, URL Filtering, Application Control, Identity Awareness, Antivirus,... to the selected gateways and configure the security settings on them.

- Track and monitor security logs.

- send commands to the Management API. Supporting Management API helps automated tasks for daily operation or integrate with third-party solution SIEM/SOAR.

The most valuable feature is Management API. It has been supported since R80 and above. Why? For firewall administrators who handle many tasks daily on not only Check Point systems. They are flooded with their boring manual tasks but always got stuck with request tickets. For security analysts who work with numerous logs from many sources and take actions to stop attacks. Can analysist and protection be highly effective if they must take much time in implementing policies? All limitations above can be solved with Check Point Management API. The administrators can automate and improve their productivity in operation by scripting. The security analysts can immediately apply security settings on the firewall while saving their time and concentrate on their research job. This feature is very useful and Check Point works great job to support many security aspects with easy-to-understand guide.

In complex environment, the Security Management system manages many firewall gateways. There are thousands of security rules in the server and there are also other security settings about Check Point blades. Database in the server becomes large. Hence installing policy takes very long time to complete. Imagine that the administrators must process their daily tickets. They make configuration changes in Smart Console of Management Server for the first ticket, and while waiting for installation completion, then they receive the second ticket, a critical case, what should they do? This is only one of the situations that the administrators are facing in operation. Hope that Check Point can improve the processing time of installation.

More than 5 years

Check Point TAC team is very professional.

Positive

Only manage Check Point gateways by using Check Point Management Server. I used other firewall vendors like Cisco, Fortinet but Check Point is much better about stability and performance. So using central management for Check Point is best choice.

Easy of setup

I always implement by myself because it's very easy to implement.

Check Point Security Management is primarily used for managing our security gateways that are deployed in multiple offices around the world. We have 20+ gateways in total. 

Security management also has reporting functionality which can be passed off to our internal security team as well as our senior leadership team. 

SmartView is also a handy utility that allows our system admins to have insight into the network traffic which reduces the need to contact the network support team each time something is not functioning.

Check Point Security Management has improved the organization and it assists with easy manageability of all of our globally deployed gateways which if they were not centrally managed, would be very time-consuming to manage. 

The compliance blade provides detailed reports in regards to our policy configuration and global configuration of the gateways which can be easily read to determine if something needs to be actioned. It also contains multiple different other reports that can be utilized by various other departments.

The compliance is great. It verifies the overall compliance of all of the gateways and attached policies against standards. It offers ready-to-use reports that are detailed.

The SmartView monitor is helpful. Having the ability to give read-only access to our system admins where they can look into the firewall logs is a huge plus and reduces the load on the dependency of the network admins. Also, it is very handy in that it is a web console and not an application that needs to be installed on your computer to view the logs. 

It displays very nice dashboards.

Being a security appliance, there should be the ability for the Security Management server to send email alerts via authenticated email. One of our requirements from the organization is to not use unauthenticated email and to only use authenticated email which this does not support.

SmartConsole should be available for MacOS machines. Not every Network/Security administrator utilizes a Windows machine. Being a Mac user, I need to have a VM with SmartConsole installed in order to be able to manage my gateways. I have heard the newer versions allow management through a web version however I have not tested it as of this moment.

I've been using the solution for more than three years.

The solution is very stable.

In terms of scalability, the licensing is restrictive and are cookie-cutter solutions for a number of gateways.

The L1/L2 agents seem inexperienced. Cases often need to be escalated. 

Negative

Yes, we did use something else. We switched as we were looking for something that had a bigger feature set.

We looked into SonicWall and Palo Alto.

The solution is used to manage security gateways. We use the management server to manage our firewalls, one at DR and the other at HQ. 

The Management servers are also used to manage security policies to determine who or what system should connect to what. This allows us to block applications that are not needed per department. For example, Facebook is blocked for everyone except the marketing team. This helps keep people more productive. We also use the rules to prevent users from visiting dangerous and illegal sites.  

It has helped improve work in our organization. Check Point Management tracks a lot of activities on the network such as who is connecting to what sites and applications. 

It has also provided visibility into who is connecting to the corporate network via VPN and at what time which helps us keep unauthorized users away. 

The interface also makes it easy for us to configure the VPN from the GUI rather than the command line, which makes it easy even for less experienced engineers to work with. 

The management also gives visibility into licenses and device-related information to help track how long you have till licenses expire and the software and hardware health of devices. 

The smart event feature is the most valuable. The consolidated logs give full network visibility. 

The smart console has been able to provide us with good detailed information and reports ranging from bandwidth, risky applications, IPS reports, VPN reports, and infected hosts on the network. 

Reports help determine which machines may be infected with bots if they indicate that they were trying to connect to command and control servers, smart event helps determine these machines by IP address or username. 

The IPS also indicates what attacks and from where we're trying to hit our organization which helps us twerk our settings accordingly to have the most security we can get. 

It could improve by showing DNS-specific information for connections to unknown public IPs. 

Check Point could also improve management by not having applications for each version released because we have to install a new application for every version it is not very nice. They could do that by moving management to the web so that we do not have to install a client for every version. 

The fact that you have to connect to two different applications for management, does not make it the most usable. It could be great to have a system setting and policy setting done from one interface. 

I've been using the solution for four years.

It's a very stable solution and Check Point is always doing proactive support to avoid any future problems or failures. Checkpoint support fixes bugs that they discover before the implemented production systems are affected. By logging a call with the customer and helping them remediate problems before they occur. 

It is reasonably scalable as you are able to manage five gateways with one management server at entry-level.

The solution offers very good customer support. The engineers respond on time and are available to help even if it means setting up a call to help you in implementing the given instructions.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. The prompt to install and the setup guide will get you through the process. When you're unclear, there are plenty of online resources to help.

We did the implementation in-house.

The solution is definitely worth it as it helps put policies that help people focus more on work than play to use company resources more efficiently.

We work with multiple clients managing their network firewalls. This includes many multi-national networks as well as local systems in the U.S.A. 

We primarily are utilizing these products for managing customer/client environments to modify access rules and other policies for controlling traffic to and from both internal and external networks as well as cloud-based Azure systems. 

Check Point management products are in use in all these networks, including both standard Single Management Servers as well as Multi-Domain Management servers.

Check Point Security Management has always made it simple and easy to manage all our firewall systems and firewall policies. 

Check Point Security Management systems, both standard Single Management Servers as well as Multi-Domain Management servers, have made it very simple and easy to perform daily functions such as adding new user hosts or destination servers to existing firewall policy rules and successfully managing large corporate networks easily from both our office space or from remote worker systems.

We love the ability to monitor performance in real-time, and gather critical information about network flows and traffic. 

The controls for creating, modifying, and editing firewall policies, firewall configurations, and other system operations are very simple and seamless. Accessing and viewing logging from many firewalls worldwide is also made very simple and intuitive with the ability to see both an overall picture of the logging, as well as the ability to filter down to the most specific traffic flows.

Sometimes there are some performance issues that cause certain operations to run slowly, however, that may just be due to the hardware it is running on needing to be stronger. Check Point could possibly lighten up the software code so that it is not as resource-intensive and will run more smoothly on a variety of hardware and cloud or virtual machine platforms. 

More ability for users to generate reports for traffic flows, firewall performance factors like CPU, memory usage, total bandwidth consumption, and tracing heavy traffic (elephant) flows would also be great.

I've used the solution for over seven years.

So far, we have not experienced really serious issues with the stability of the platform.

Check Point Security Management is pretty robust at allowing the management of large numbers of firewalls - especially the Multi-Domain systems.

Though we do not need to utilize the support services often, they have always been prompt and courteous, and definitely knowledgeable.

Positive

Some of our clients have switched from other firewall solutions such as Fortinet or Palo Alto, however, they were not happy with these systems for various reasons.

These systems are pretty straightforward to install and implement.

Check Point seems to be reasonable with its pricing, and competitive in the market.

Sometimes our clients look at other options such as Palo Alto, or even a blend of these and Check Point.

We use Check Point Security Gateway GAIA R 80.40 as our secure gateway firewall. We have configured two gateways as active-passive in cluster mode. We also use R 80.40 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 different 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. 

Check Point Security Management GAIA R 80.40 tremendously helped us in securing our network perimeter against various threats. 

We have used the access rules and application/URL filtering blades to filter and restrict unwanted traffic. 

The IPS blade, Antivirus blade, Anti-bot blade, Threat Emulation blade, and Threat Prevention blades are helping us tremendously in preventing attacks and thus take care of the threats at the gateways themselves. 

At the time of COVID, the Mobile Access blade has helped greatly in the smooth running of production.

We have found all the security blades very helpful. The IPS blade, Antivirus blade, Anti-bot blade, Threat Emulation blade, and Threat Prevention blades have been most useful in securing the network. 

With the antivirus, IPS, and Anti-bot blades signatures being automatically updated regularly on a daily/hourly basis, the network is always safe. 

The URL and Application Filter blade offers a daily update of the database which helps us control the traffic. 

Mobile access has helped us cater to more than 4000 users so that they can work from home.

The Security Management server could be improved. If it provided an inbuilt authenticator for multifactor authentication, that would be ideal. Currently, we have to depend on a third party for multifactor authentication. 

It would help us greatly in securing the remote access users if Mac binding can be done for remote access VPN users in mobile. It would be helpful if we could enable URL and application traffic control remote access. 

The logging and reporting are good, but it would be helpful if more report templates were available.

I have been using Check Point Security Gateway for more than 7 years.

The stability is great.

The scalability is great.

Technical support is good.

Positive

The company has been using Check Point for a long time. It's been more than 10 years. I have been with the company for past 7 Years.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We had assistance from our Vendor Team (ISecurenet). They are very good.

Our ROI has been above expectations.

The price is high but worth it.

Check Point is one of the top leaders in security solutions.

We use Check Point Multi-Domain Management (Provider-1) to manage several customers with their firewalls as well as handle our internal administrators based on their rights.

Each domain (CMA) contains the customer's firewalls that are managed by us. Bigger customers with more than one domain use global objects as well as global rules so that administrators do not have to implement a local object for each domain.

Since this environment is bigger, we also use a dedicated log server for each domain. That way the logs reside in a different virtual log server.

When using global rules and objects it is possible to push changes to several domains at the same time without touching each individually.

Administration of all users within a single environment makes it easy, instead of connecting to management individually. Using templates for rights helps a lot too.

Last but not least, by only using one VM (or 2 if you include the log server), upgrading and patching are easier. You have a bigger maintenance window, but do not have to upgrade several Security Management Servers by themselves.

Using a single GUI with a single management IP makes things easier if you have to administrate several customers. In the Multi-Domain Environment, you are able to see an overview of all the different customers.

Several health checks are shown for the gateways in an overview so you don't always have to use a monitoring system in parallel since you see some states at a glance after logging in.

Having the possibility to use Smart Event to check for threats on a broader scale helps after a security incident and also makes it easier to check - instead of looking through different logs.

Troubleshooting is quite complicated within multi-domain management. If an issue arises, the local administrator has to keep in mind that there are other domains that could be also affected.

For each version, you have to download a new GUI. Sometimes the GUIs have fixes in them. If you need a new one, you have to inform and update all administrators too.

Some features still use the legacy GUI, however, as far as I know, it is planned to include this in newer versions (R81+). 

Unfortunately, there is still not a rule checker in place where you can insert SRC/DST/Port and it shows you which rule it matches.

I've used the solution for over 10 years.

The solution can scale, depending on the VM environment.

The installation process is quite easy.

Throughout my professional career I have operated, implemented, and designed solutions with Checkpoint's NGFW for clients of all kinds - public and private, small and large.

For all scenarios, there is a suitable solution with this manufacturer. Its decades of experience make it one of the undisputed leaders in the industry.

In recent times, the platform has evolved significantly to meet the latest threats. I would recommend at least valuing it as an option whenever an opportunity arises to cover cybersecurity needs.

Having a central point to manage all its capabilities makes it much easier to react quickly and accurately to a threat, which is essential in this day and age where attacks can be lethal to our network if not dealt with quickly.

I have actively participated in the defense of very important customers who were able to overcome the challenge thanks to the great visibility that the console offered them. The other additional capabilities that we can integrate into the platform are also a very important added value.

One of the features that attract me the most is being able to activate different functionalities through its blades, having centralized point access to all of them, and being able to activate and deactivate them as needed.

In addition, the fact that everything starts from the same unified management console makes it very easy to integrate new equipment or functionalities once the operator has become familiar with it, as everything will follow similar management or operation mechanisms.

This is one of the aspects I value the most.

In my experience, the place they can improve the most is in the technical support where I have had some serious problems that could not be solved in time due to a lack of knowledge of the assigned engineer.

It would be a good policy to try to assign senior engineers when it has been verified that an incident is critical and urgent for a client and not to resort to less-experienced technicians that can put at risk the recovery of the attacked assets.

Apart from that, at the architectural level, it is a very competent and versatile solution.

I've used the solution for more than 15 years.

Overall, it is a very mature and stable solution.

With the arrival of Quantum Maestro, the platform's expansion capabilities have increased tremendously. Its new architecture is promising.

In general, they work very well, however, it should be prioritized and they need to assign senior technicians when the issue has been verified that it is very critical for the customer.

Due to working in an international MSSP, I have worked and continue to work with all manufacturers.

We always try to do the implementation work with our own SOC of experts.

It depends a lot on each case and on the customer's needs and capabilities.

It's not the cheapest solution, but one of the most advanced and competent.

We always evaluate alternatives and try to see what fits the client best. Fortinet, PaloAlto, Checkpoint, Cisco, et cetera.

We use the solution for a distributed lean IT environment where there's a need to monitor logs, threats, and events, or requires configuring security policies within a single dashboard.

It's great for customers who are searching for an upgraded top to bottom yet simple and improved log management solution. In such cases, Check Point Management works perfectly.

Wherever we have provided such a solution, it has become very easy for IT administrators to manage not only a single location but also geographically distributed workplaces.

It works similarly to other management software in the industry, but Check Point is far beyond all others due to its management log monitoring functionality.

After integration with the R80 series, Check Point has made most organizations become relatively secure as configuration with security policies, IPS, and log management extend to the maximum ability.

Previously, we needed to monitor all logs related to network traffic and threats and had to audit logs in different dashboards which sometimes felt time and memory consuming.

With the R80 management consoles, all tasks become very easy - starting from gateway management, log monitoring, IPS configuration, global properties configuration, etc.

Some of the great aspects of the solution include:

1. Smart Event is a great feature of the Check Point management console. It gives a complete graphical view of more than a year of traffic flow including botnet traffic, malicious host present in-network, compromised hosts, and many more.

2. Object (based on IP, hostname, domain name) configuration.

3. Application and URL filtering configuration.

4. Log monitoring and alert configuration.

5. IPS configuration with improved performance.

6. Applying filters based on source, destination, port, application, etc. which is easy compared to all other vendors in the market.

7. Managing clustering for gateways - including their live health check performance - can be done on the dashboard itself.

8. The SSL VPN monitoring based on users and tunnel monitoring are great value-added features present in the management console.

The solution could be improved in these ways:

1. In order to work the management console properly we're required to have more memory and CPU on the system where we need to install a setup.

2. Due to the large size of logs generated for daily traffic, even when old logs purging is enabled, we need to delete old logs manually or else it causes errors while publishing policies which slow down the process.

3. SD-WAN functionality could be added.

4. The required license addition for every blade is a bit of a complicated task for normal IT admins to understand.

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

Stability is always improving day by day with Hotfixes they are releasing.

We can scale up to a maximum limit.

The technical support is very knowledgeable.

We have good relations with Check Point. This is the main reason we have always preferred it. The technical support offered by Check Point is always a top priority.

Customer from Sophos to Check Point and ASA to Check Point has migrated to our centralized management from Check Point.

The initial setup is straightforward, however, it can get a little complex for migration from another vendor to Check Point.

We had the assistance of vendor support during the implementation.

Check Point licenses work very differently compared to other vendors. We need to purchase each blade in order to make it work, but we can easily obtain a trial (evaluation) license from Check Point to get visibility for the blade.

Check Point tries to maintain relationships with customers and they try to match their price with customer expectations.

Palo Alto is most preferred NGFW compared to Check Point, due to having a large market share.