Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

Check Point Software Technologies and Cisco are both solutions in the Cloud and Data Center Security category. Check Point Software Technologies is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.5, while Cisco is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.5. Check Point Software Technologies holds a 2.2% mindshare in CDCS, compared to Cisco’s 12.8% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Check Point Software Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco users who would recommend it.

Check Point CloudGuard Netw...

Read 155 Check Point CloudGuard Network Security reviews

5,029 Views
1,157 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Cisco Secure Workload

Read 15 Cisco Secure Workload reviews

4,455 Views
3,074 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Check Point CloudGuard Netw...

Cisco Secure Workload

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security and Cisco Secure Workload compete in the network security domain. Cisco Secure Workload is observed to generally offer superior features, while Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is acknowledged for its pricing and customer support.

Features: Check Point CloudGuard Network Security provides advanced threat prevention, comprehensive visibility, and flexible management across cloud environments. Cisco Secure Workload excels in workload protection, zero-trust security, and micro-segmentation, giving it an edge with workload-centric features.

Room for Improvement: Check Point CloudGuard Network Security could benefit from enhanced integration with more third-party tools, improved user interface for cloud management, and more frequent updates to threat intelligence. Cisco Secure Workload could improve by simplifying its deployment complexity, enhancing scalability options for smaller businesses, and reducing the steep learning curve associated with its setup.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Check Point CloudGuard Network Security offers an intuitive deployment process with strong customer service and technical support. Cisco Secure Workload requires a more complex deployment process with a noticeable learning curve, although it provides good integration capabilities across various environments.

Pricing and ROI: Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is known for its cost-effectiveness and strong ROI, appealing to budget-conscious organizations. Cisco Secure Workload involves higher initial costs but justifies them with its extensive features, offering satisfactory ROI over the long term as per some users’ perspectives.

To learn more, read our detailed Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload

September 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 872,869 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Check Point CloudGuard Netw...

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

155

Ranking in other categories

Firewalls (8th), Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (2nd), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (4th), WAN Edge (3rd), Unified Threat Management (UTM) (3rd)

Cisco Secure Workload

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

9th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (14th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is 2.2%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 12.8%, up from 12.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud and Data Center Security Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security	2.2%
Cisco Secure Workload	12.8%
Other	85.0%

Cloud and Data Center Security

Featured Reviews

Martin Raška

Senior Security Engineer & Instructor at Arrow Electronics

Unification of security features strengthens network protection

The overall network security is good. It's big-picture, all in one bundle. It's valuable to have everything in one place instead of spreading across different products. Unified security management positively affects a company's security operations. They have one unified view of the security. I can connect multiple gateways to the management and have it in one place. I can have reporting and views in a single pane of glass on the consolidated platform. It's easy to use. The management is the best on the market. It's very easy to work with, read, understand, and navigate. It helps increase our customer's security posture. We can see in some cases CloudGuard improves our customers' posture overall.

Read full review

Raj Metkar

Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA

Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The solution has been quite stable."

"CloudGuard Network security has increased our confidence in secure cloud deployments and migrations by 50%."

"CloudGuard Network Security provides unified security management across hybrid clouds as well as on-prem. It's very important because when I have unified security, I have better control of the situation. If there's an attack or something like that, we can react faster. It's easier for everyone in the organization to work with the Infinity platform."

"We have unified management. It is one of the advantages of this product."

"The 24/7 online customer support services enhance effective operations and provide quick services in case of a system failure."

"It's possible to sync the Check Point Management with the cloud portal, therefore allowing automated rules to be set in place whenever creating a new VM."

"The versatility is the solution's most valuable feature."

"Check Point CloudGuard Network Security provides us with unified security management across hybrid clouds as well as on-premise."

More Check Point CloudGuard Network Security pros

"Instead of proving that all the access control lists are in place and all the EPGs are correct, we can just point the auditor to a dashboard and point out that there aren't any escaped conversations. It saves an enormous, enormous amount of time."

"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."

"The only use case I can see that makes sense is micro-segmentation. I think there are other use cases for it. The main purpose of the product is to do micro-segmentation by collecting IP. That could be done by installing an agent, and then you have all the communication coming in and out. You could also use some flow sensors installed in the network that receive a copy of the traffic and then report that back to the system."

"By using Tetration insight, we are able to get the latency on our level accounts and we can determine whatever the issue is with the application latency itself."

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."

"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is security."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

Cons

"Zero touch removes any independence for configuring."

"It needs to cover additional kinds of infrastructure, like containers and serverless options. It's somewhat limited in that area."

"The user interface could be more intuitive."

"They are coming out with more SD-WAN express route support from a firewall perspective. That would be great."

"The initial setup is complex and could be made simpler."

"Every good security product requires a company with many research departments and staff."

"We faced issues while upgrading our CloudGuard Network Gateway. When we tried to use the template that Check Point offers on their site, it was not available for the second to the latest version, so I was forced to upgrade my management server. That was very challenging for us."

"The price of the solution could be reduced, it is expensive."

More Check Point CloudGuard Network Security cons

"The product must be integrated with the cloud."

"They should scale down the hardware a bit. The initial hardware investment is two million dollars so it's a price point problem. The issue with the price comes from the fact that you have to have it with enormous storage and enormous computes."

"It is not so easy to use and configure. It needs a bunch of further resources to work, which is mainly the biggest downside of it. The deployment is huge."

"There's room for improvement when it comes to Cisco Secure Workload. A couple of internal areas could be refined a little bit. They are trying to solve it, depending on where you suppose the agent is. Suppose you have the agent on both the server and the client, which could be the front-end server or web server connecting to the. In that case, if those two are communicating on RPC, the server can look into its configuration. It could go down and find the configuration file on the FTP server and then set the policies to it. But there are a lot of different FTP servers out there. It's also a complex case for the tool to support all FTP servers."

"Secure Workload is a little complicated to use, and the dashboard isn't intuitive, so it takes a while to learn how to use it."

"The multi-tenancy, redundancy, backup and restore functionalities, as well as the monitoring aspects of the solution, need improvement. The solution offers virtually no enterprise-grade possibility for monitoring."

"I'd like to see better documentation for advanced features. The documentation is fairly basic. I would also like to see better integration with other applications."

"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is fairly priced, but it can be a little expensive from time to time."

"The product's licensing costs are yearly."

"The price could be better."

"It is an expensive product, but when you realize that you need it, it does not feel so expensive. We have had a good experience with them as partners. They have helped us with designing and having good architecture and the best equipment at the best prices. We find it a good deal."

"The licensing model has since transitioned to a cluster-based variant."

"CloudGuard Network Security's pricing is fine."

"They're a little high in price. The price could be lower."

"I do not have too much to compare to, but if I compare it with Azure Firewall, Scale Set is quite good. It has quite a good price."

More Check Point CloudGuard Network Security pricing and cost advice

"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."

"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."

"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."

"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."

"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."

"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."

"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud and Data Center Security solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

872,869 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

21%

Performing Arts

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

20%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	61
Midsize Enterprise	38
Large Enterprise	75

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	8

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?

The tool's most valuable feature is its management console.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is that it was good.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?

I think Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is an ideal product, so I see no improvements needed. If I had to think of one area where it could be improved or made easier, I would say that suppo...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?

The product provides multiple-device integration.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?

CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discovery. This raises questions about the resources required to discover and write po...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

See all answers

Comparisons

Fortinet FortiGate vs Check Point CloudGuard Network Security

Compared 14% of the time

Cisco Secure Firewall vs Check Point CloudGuard Network Security

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Firewall vs Check Point CloudGuard Network Security

Compared 9% of the time

Trend Micro Deep Security vs Check Point CloudGuard Network Security

Compared 7% of the time

Cisco Meraki MX vs Check Point CloudGuard Network Security

Compared 4% of the time

More Check Point CloudGuard Network Security Competitors

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 20% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 15% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 15% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 10% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security

November 2025

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security report

Download Check Point CloudGuard Network Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

November 2025

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Also Known As

CloudGuard IaaS, Check Point vSEC, CloudGuard IaaS, Check Point Virtual Systems, Check Point CloudGuard Network Security

Cisco Tetration

Overview

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security offers centralized management, robust threat prevention, and seamless integration with major public clouds, ensuring consistent security for cloud and on-premises environments. It combines ease of use with flexibility across diverse IT infrastructure.

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security provides comprehensive protection for IT infrastructures in AWS, Azure, and hybrid environments. It ensures firewall security, managing traffic and securing cloud infrastructures while maintaining network protection and compliance enforcement. Organizations benefit from its centralized security governance, enhanced visibility, and threat prevention for both perimeter and internal security. It offers seamless integration with leading cloud platforms, allowing for efficient deployment and scalability, aligning with modern cloud requirements.

What are the key features of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?

Ease of Setup and Use: Provides a user-friendly setup process and intuitive operation.
Robust Threat Prevention: Offers advanced capabilities to safeguard against potential threats.
Auto-Scaling: Adjusts resources dynamically to meet demand without manual intervention.
Centralized Management: Ensures uniform security policies across cloud and on-premises environments.
Integration with Major Public Clouds: Seamlessly works with AWS, Azure, and other leading platforms.
Intuitive ACL Menu: Simplifies access control list management with an easy-to-navigate interface.
Customizable Policy Options: Allows for personalized security settings suited to specific requirements.

What benefits should companies look for in Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?

Enhanced Operational Efficiency: Through automation and comprehensive reporting, organizations streamline operations.
Consistent Security Management: Offers uniform policies across different environments, reducing complexity.
Improved Threat Detection: Increases the ability to identify and respond to threats quickly.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing or changing infrastructure needs without compromising security.

In industries such as finance, healthcare, and tech, Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is vital for protecting sensitive data, managing compliance, and safeguarding daily operations. Its robust integration capabilities support diverse infrastructure setups, assisting companies in maintaining high-security standards efficiently.

Check Point Software Technologies

Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

Reviews from Real Users

“The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

Cisco

Sample Customers

Physicians Choice Laboratory Services, Helvetica Insurance

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

Buyer's Guide

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload

September 2025

Free Report: Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload

Find out what your peers are saying about Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

872,869 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload report.

See our list of best Cloud and Data Center Security vendors.

We monitor all Cloud and Data Center Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.