Check Point CloudGuard Network Security Reviews

The use depends on the case. I have many customers. Right now, I have one customer, and it's a collection of these functions. The basic ones involve making numerous rules in normal network security. I can protect my emails and files. If someone from my company tries to upload something from the Internet, and I don't know if it’s sensitive, this can help protect my data.

It allows us to make a lot of rules around network security. It helps us protect emails and files. We have the power to protect our data.

There's a whole range of functions that make up prevention against malware and everything. It’s not just one aspect that garners my attention - the whole application is being used to defend. Even as the complexity increases, it is maintained at the same level. And with increasing complexity, I become more efficient, so I have to spend at least the same amount of time.

CloudGuard Network Security provides our customers with unified security management across hybrid clouds as well as on-premise.

In terms of security operations, it helps people spend less time. Integrations make work more efficient.

So far, it's helped our companies to reduce organizational risk by 99%.

We're very confident in the secure cloud deployments and migrations. We feel more safe. It's reliable and it helps avoid mistakes. 

Everything is in one place, and it seems it's easier to use than before. Making it even easier is a good way to improve it more. When it's easier to use, there are fewer mistakes.

I have used the Check Point product for around six years now. 

Stability is okay. I am not aware of any potential stability issues. Check Point is one of the best vendors in this regard.

Performance scalability is good. For my customers, they can add what they want. This is what customers want: the options to get the scalability they need. We simply need to manage the traffic accordingly.

Every experience is different. Every ticket is different, and sometimes it's a little bit painful to pinpoint problems. Sometimes I have a quick solution. Sometimes I am angry, and sometimes I am okay with it.

Neutral

I have worked with Fortinet, however, not with integration into the cloud; it was on-premises solutions. So, I am not sure if I can compare the two, since it's different when it's on the cloud. 

My understanding is the initial setup should be easy. 

The licensing is a bit expensive. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

On-premises

My primary use case is for the protection of environments that are in the cloud and multiple branches and areas that are in the layout of all the systems.

This solution helped us migrate to cloud environments from environments that were on premises. It helped us implement protection for our systems. The fact that it is part of Check Point's overall protection system within some kind of central management system allows us to easily manage and gain visibility on everything that happens in the organization.

The protection is at a very good level. There's a very high catch rate. It has good flexibility in operating and implementing the system.

Protection is valuable to me because security is the most important aspect. At the end of the day we are looking for what will give us the answer at the best level.

It is easy to implement, and it has a lot of flexibility compared to other systems you have in the organization. In the end, this is a parameter that, in my eyes, is very central.

In the end, it saves time. It's all in one place and you can quickly see how you're doing with the cloud environment. It just makes things easier and helps on a daily basis because it optimizes the understanding of what we have. 

Instead of logging into the system by yourself and starting to check, there's another management system that sees logs. It examines the data daily, and it creates flexibility regarding what we want to investigate. It is much easier for everything to be in the same management and not scattered in all sorts of different places.

Check Point helped me a lot to know that I have a solution that is stable and answers my needs. It really gave me the confidence to move forward with the whole migration to the cloud. It was very helpful.

When I moved to the cloud, I looked at Check Point's solution and as soon as it suited me, I bought it. We chose CheckPoint right away, it was our go-to choice.

From my point of view and my needs, I don't see room for improvement. In my opinion, the more it has support for more environments and the more integration there is with wider areas, not only in Check Point's systems, but also with other systems, then I think it will allow access to more customers which is not specifically my case, but in principle the wider the system, the more it will be able to appeal to a larger audience; integration with other manufacturers in other words.

I have been using CloudGuard Network Security for two years.

The platform is very good in terms of stability. We never encountered any issue with it.

Scalability is very good.

Support is very good. The response time is good and fast, and they are also very professional.

Positive

I had help from a Check Point CS and it all went smoothly. There was only one person from Check Point who was in constant communication with us and provided us service in installing the solution, my experience with him was very good.

After running a test against what alternatives exist in the market and seeing what they offer, this is the solution that fits perfectly into our budget. This is a very important parameter for us, and Check Point CloudGuard Network Security did so.

The price was really good, that's the main reason we chose it. In addition, the licensing model was very simple.

I appreciate the cloud network security. I find it to be very effective, and I am pleased with securing cloud deployments.

I would rate CloudGuard Network Security an eight out of ten. There's always room for improvement. It could become a 10 if they had more accessibility to other platforms. Overall, it is a good product.

On-premises

We are using Check Point CloudGuard as a firewall. Along with the firewall, we have incorporated multiple blades. Initially, the firewall used to be a single security device, and along with that, we required antibot, antivirus, IPS, and IDS devices. Check Point CloudGuard is a combination of all the devices and functionalities in a single device. It is a next-generation firewall. The main use case of this firewall is to protect our entire cloud and provide perimeter cloud security at L3 and L4 levels.

It is a next-generation firewall. Threat prevention and threat detection blades are available with the firewall. As soon as you enable the blades and you have the license for it, you are good in terms of threat prevention. You do not need to do any specific settings. You just need to enable the blade, and the firewall will take care of the rest of the things. That is how it works.

We are using the Check Point CloudGuard firewall with autoscaling in the AWS and Azure cloud. We have a minimum capacity of two firewalls and a maximum capacity of ten firewalls. If the CPU utilization increases or the memory utilization increases, the capacity will be increased to three from two. Till the service comes down to the threshold level, it will keep on adding more firewalls, so we have ease of operations. We do need not to worry about what we will do if a firewall fails.

When I joined my organization, we were using this CloudGuard firewall in the active/standby firewall cluster. In such a setup, the firewall that is active processes your traffic. The other firewall is in the standby mode. It is not processing the traffic, but it is still costing you. Even though it is not being used, it is still cost-consuming at the cloud level. We changed the setting to autoscaling. After adopting the autoscaling mode for this firewall, we need a lower number of CPU and memory. All the firewalls are active, so we need not worry about the standby firewalls and all those things. So, we have transitioned from these conventional active/standby firewalls to autoscaling firewalls. With this, we are able to save costs and improve performance. All the firewalls are active/active but with fewer CPU cores. When we have fewer CPU cores, we need less number of licenses, so we were able to save the cost. The performance has also been great.

The most important feature is that we are able to use Check Point CloudGuard Firewall for our cloud security. We can make the deployment automated. We do not require manual intervention. With the help of automation, we are able to deploy it within minutes, and we are able to discard it within minutes. We can do hardening and create policies. All those things are very advanced.

Secondly, Check Point is one of the big OEMs available in the world from the firewall perspective. It is better than Palo Alto and Juniper firewalls. It is one of the best firewalls available in the industry.

We have done a lot of automation with the firewall, but sometimes, there are some failures because of some bugs. The fixes for them are still not available. We have daily or weekly communication with the Check Point people giving support in the India region, but we have not seen much improvement or response to our requests for some additional features. We are moving to infra as a code, so we are expecting more advancements in this product. Just installing the patches is not going to help us. They need to focus on this area.

I expect Check Point CloudGuard to come up with some AI/ML integration. A firewall is the first L3 security device available to you. It is the single point that manages or processes the traffic for an organization. There is a possibility that the device goes down or gets rebooted for any reason. The integration of artificial intelligence with the devices can help us to know in advance that there might be a surge in traffic. There might be a spike in the traffic, so we can have some additional firewalls integrated. This predictive analysis has to be there. This way, if required, a second, third, or fourth firewall can come into the picture. All the firewalls will process the traffic simultaneously. I am expecting such capability. This sort of feature is available with AWS. We are deploying all the firewalls on AWS, but it would be easy if, in the future, such a feature is available from the OEM or Check Point itself. It will be very helpful for the organization.

We have had a couple of outages because of some misconfiguration. They were human errors but there were no prior indications that if we were making these sorts of changes, this would happen. People making the changes on the firewall were not aware of this, and that is the reason why the outage happened. In a financial organization, an outage of even five minutes can cost a lot.

In our organization, we have been using it for more than four or five years, but I have hands-on experience with it for the last three years. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten for stability.

It is scalable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

I would rate their support a five out of ten because I never got good support. Whenever I have raised a TAC case, their support has not been great. It is not as good as others.

They need to improve from a knowledge perspective. I had a couple of issues, and they could not understand those issues easily. They should not just take the logs and analyze the logs. They should be providing a solution. Being a financial organization, we cannot afford a long downtime. We expect a faster resolution. If a support engineer is not capable of handling a case, he or she should escalate it to a higher level, but they are not doing that on a regular basis. They make you lose days by dragging the case.

Neutral

In my organization, we have two different Infra teams. We have the Network Security Infrastructure team that manages the on-premises setup, and then we have the Cloud Network Security team that manages the cloud. I am a part of the Cloud Network Security team, and we are using the Check Point firewall. The on-premises team was using Juniper and Palo Alto firewalls, and they are now using the Check Point firewall. It is one of the most effective products we have ever used, and that is the reason why that team has moved from other OEMs to Check Point CloudGuard.

We have deployed it on the cloud. We have AWS, Azure, and GCP clouds.

The deployment was done with the help of AWS CloudFormation templates which are very generalized. I just downloaded the templates and customized them as per our requirements. I faced a few challenges because I was not completely knowledgeable about CloudFormation, etc. It was not very challenging from the Check Point side. It was an easy deployment.

I faced a couple of challenges while integrating it with our existing ecosystem. Even though Check Point is the OEM, we have third-party vendor support here in India. The challenges that I was facing at the time were also new for them, so I sorted out those issues myself by referencing some online articles on Check Point. I was able to overcome those challenges at the time. It was not a big deal. There was no huge challenge.

Initially, we involved people from Check Point and the third-party vendor of Check Point, but at later stages, we were capable enough to develop things in-house, so we did it ourselves.

The Cloud Network Security team has ten people. I am handling the AWS cloud deployment along with a colleague. Other colleagues are involved in Azure and GCP deployment. Overall, there are ten people for deployment and management, but mainly, two or three people are involved in the deployment at a time.

We have deployed it in two regions. It is deployed in the Mumbai and Hyderabad regions of AWS in India.

We have seen 70% to 80% ROI. 

I do not know the exact price, but it is fairly priced. It is neither cheap nor costly.

As compared to other OEM vendors in the market, it is cost-effective for us. There are multiple things we need to consider while selecting a certain product. We have AWS, Azure, and GCP clouds, and we have multiple firewalls. All of our firewalls are Check Point CloudGuard firewalls. The cost can vary based on the licenses that you are using. For IPS, IDS, antivirus, antibot, and other capabilities, additional licensing costs might be there. When it comes to security, it gives us great security. Considering that factor, it is cost-effective for us.

I have not evaluated other solutions. Based on the input from my seniors, this is the best solution available in the market. I have heard that Palo Alto also has a cloud-based product called Prisma Cloud, which has some advanced features integrated by using AI/ML technologies. I would love to evaluate Prisma Cloud.

I feel confident using this product. In fact, I have completed a few certifications related to Check Point CloudGuard. I am a Check Point certified administrator, and I am also a Check Point Certified Cloud Specialist. I have also been working with automation-related things, and sometimes, we do some bash scripting and shell scripting to make things easier for us. Traditionally, you can only access the firewall via a CLI. That is the basic level, and at the next level, you should be able to do a few daily things in an automated way. I am very good at that.

I would recommend this solution, but it also depends on the requirements. It is a cost-effective solution. If you are a small organization or a startup, you do not need to have this solution. If you are a big organization with 5,000 to 10,000 users, you can go ahead with it. The ROI for our organization was up to 80%, but it necessarily would not be the same for other organizations.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

I am tasked with deploying firewalls in Azure Cloud, AWS, and VMware. This involves setting up virtual machines in VMware and is essentially focused on these tasks.

It does a great job protecting the clouds.

The important point is that the solution is integrated into our management system (if they already have Check Point). It's just one more gateway to add. We have it on Azure and others. The advantage lies in the integration within our existing ecosystem, which is amazing.

It's good at identifying threats and on par with the market - at least, in comparison to the others we work with. 

We have confidence in secure cloud deployments and integrations. It's important to have confidence. Even if nothing happens, you are protected, You never know when bad luck will happen. There are some public cases that were missing network security on the cloud, and they were affected. It's a must-have, like an insurance policy. 

The license model could be simpler. We have some issues with the license since it tries to be simple, and yet in some cases, it tends to be complex. Apart from that, I do not recall any other issues.

I have been using the solution for roughly four years.

The stability is generally good. Sometimes there are issues we do not understand, especially with older features. Outside of that, the stability is good. It could be better. For instance, when we are working on a release and do an upgrade, we start experiencing unexpected issues. New features might have problems, however, for existing ones, we expect the same level of functionality as before.

We do not use scalability. I do not have much experience with auto scaling, however, it could be beneficial. Usually, our customers use a model that involves bringing their own licenses with static gateways, not scaling out.

Check Point support has its ups and downs. Sometimes, the support is good, and other times, we are a bit desperate. Overall, I would say the customer service is good, not marvellous. There are some challenges.

Positive

As integrators, we also work with other solutions. The main difference is we can take advantage of integrative management. If you already have an environment with Check Point, it's easy and an advantage. 

We typically deploy to the cloud. We create an implementation strategy with our clients. 

Usually, the customer is very savvy and knows what they want. We provide some advice, however, usually, they have their own ideas on what to do and when to do it.

It is important to have this solution because even if nothing happens, you are not protected without it. You never know when bad luck might knock at your door. 

I rate it eight out of ten. 

You need to have some kind of protection in the cloud. Maybe the native protection is enough, maybe it is not. Having protection gives more confidence in the solution. 

Hybrid Cloud

Other

Our end customer is using Azure to host a few applications in the cloud, and we utilize CloudGuard Network Security to secure those assets.

CloudGuard Network Security provides unified security management across hybrid-clouds as well as on-prem. Our customer is also using Check Point on-premises, so we have one place to create all of our policies. It is a lot easier than doing it at different places. We have the same policy in different clouds and on-premises. That is a great thing. There is a seamless experience and the same management. That is a great advantage over using Azure's native firewall.

CloudGuard Network Security has helped reduce our organizational risk by about 15%. That is because of the ease of working with one big policy that spans the entire organization.

With CloudGuard Network Security, we get a unified solution. It does not matter if we are on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. The migration with Scale Set is nice to work with. It is very easy to upgrade and so on.

Scale Set is highly beneficial. It is easy to upgrade and maintain. 

It is pretty great in all aspects, but the integration could be easier, especially with Scale Set and related features. It was somewhat challenging a few years ago to set it up, but once completed, it worked well. Easier integration with on-premises solutions could be beneficial.

I have used the solution for about three years.

The track record is excellent, with nothing to complain about.

The scalability is great.

Their support is great. We get quick responses. The customer support consists of very talented people. They are nice to work with.

Positive

I have used Azure Firewall. I have not extensively worked on AWS. In Sweden, our focus is primarily on Azure.

We went with CloudGuard because we have been working with Check Point products for quite some time. It is an easy choice. We are already familiar with on-premises network security, so choosing the same in the cloud is a big benefit.

Maintaining the policy is not difficult at all with CloudGuard. In fact, it is easier compared to Azure Firewall, which seems a few years behind Check Point. The solution is effective for utilizing all security features Check Point provides. Although I have not used all CloudGuard features yet, its network security is akin to an on-premises firewall.

We have a CloudGuard in the cloud, and we use normal quantum gateways.

It was not as simple as on-premises, but there were good guides on how to do it, so we managed in the end.

We are the integrator in this case. We managed the implementation for one of the end customers. However, we had support from local Check Point representatives.

The main return on investment has been in the time spent working with the solution. Since everything is unified in both cloud and on-premises environments, troubleshooting is faster.

It has saved about 50% of the time. If we had two solutions, we would have to troubleshoot two solutions.

Handling costs is not my department. Licensing has been quite acceptable. It is a bit easier now, but when I began working with CloudGuard, it was a bit too technical.

My overall product rating is a nine out of ten. A slightly easier setup process would be great. Check Point is performing well. The cloud is evolving rapidly, and Check Point is keeping up efficiently. 

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

I have implemented the solution for customers at about three or four different companies now. I primarily use it for general Cloud Security to protect Azure. In most cases, it has always been about securing Azure.

For me, Checkpoint in general is characterized by the ease of day-to-day use, management, log review, and all that. This is a big plus because I can execute these tasks effectively through the Cloud, which is the biggest point for me. It is a significant improvement over Azure's security features, providing enhanced security when Checkpoint is implemented. This is especially beneficial nowadays, as businesses are working with fewer people who need to accomplish more tasks.

In my experience, the failover times are a bit poor during an HA failover in the Cloud. However, this also depends on API calls in Azure, so there is not much I can do there. If there is something I could improve, it would be this aspect.

I would say that I have used Network Security for about two years.

The first few setups are always a bit uncertain, like wondering what is going to happen. The documentation is great, but the problem with Cloud technologies is that it changes all the time, leading to outdated documentation. It can be a bit challenging in the beginning, but once I get used to it, the process is acceptable.

The stability is good, apart from the failover I mentioned before, which takes a bit of time. Again, it is not really Checkpoint's fault; it is just due to Cloud architecture. Overall, stability is good, and upgrades are proceeding well.

Scalability offers two solutions: the gateway and the load balancer setup. The load balancer setup is fantastic. If I need anything, it spins up or spins down and works smoothly. When I adopted it around three years ago, I deployed clusters in the Cloud with two firewalls in HA, but the failover was not ideal. Depending on the scenario, I need to choose the right solution.

Technical support has greatly improved over the last couple of years. It used to be less effective, but now it is in a good state. Also, interactions with salespeople from Checkpoint are going well. I have talked with Palo Alto support as well, and Checkpoint is way better.

Neutral

I just started at the company I am working for now, but my previous customer used Palo Alto. They have the same products, of course, but the usability is not the same. It is stable and good, but the usability is not equivalent.

I use multiple approaches. First, I create an architectural design and check with their Cloud team to see their implementation of their environment. Depending on that, I proceed accordingly. It is really customer-based.

For us, it is not really applicable since we sell it and that is the end of it. However, the feedback from customers has been positive. It performs well, effectively doing its job without slowing down and stopping threats. I think the customer is also receiving a significant return on investment from the solution.

The most significant advantage for a day-to-day user like me is the logs. In Palo Alto, I need to manage brackets and everything, and issues arise if something is spaced incorrectly. In Checkpoint, I can input whatever I need and get the required results. This is a major win in troubleshooting. Logging is okay on both platforms, but if I know exactly what to type in Palo Alto, it is manageable. However, they are quite similar without too big a difference. For email security, Checkpoint offers a big advantage, but that is unrelated to Network Security.

I would give it a solid eight. This is quite a good score in my opinion. Absolutely. I rate the overall solution an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10.

I am using a Public Cloud deployment model.

I use Microsoft Azure as the cloud provider.

My primary use case is to protect the cloud applications that we store specifically in Azure. 

It has helped our organization with security. We have other Check Point firewalls, so we can accumulate everything in one place and manage everything in one place.

It provides unified security management. It makes things easier and faster. We can manage it all in one place in one policy package. We do not have to worry about anything else.

It has helped us reduce our organizational risk.

The most valuable features for me are related to management. I can use the data center objects directly in the policy without worrying about specific static IP addresses. The data center objects update automatically if the IP addresses change. 

There is room for improvement in how it handles deployment itself, but I am not sure. It could be due to Azure's limitations, not Check Point's. Deploying a new firewall is quite bulky and not straightforward, especially in managing the resource group and networks. These issues seem to come more from the Azure part. It is hard to tell.

I have used the solution for about a year now.

The stability is good. I find it really good.

We do not use it regularly, but I tested it and it is quite good.

My experience with customer service was good. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it a nine out of ten, leaving a gap for improvement.

Positive

I previously used Azure Native Firewall. Other solutions were just tested. We did not use them. We left Azure Native Firewall due to the firewall's slow performance, especially for operations like applying rules. The general functionality of that firewall was incomparable to CloudGuard. 

We have a hybrid environment. We have Azure Cloud.

The initial setup was fine for me. All the complications likely come from Azure. Generally, from Check Point's perspective, it is pretty simple to set up the firewall and attach it to the management. It is easy.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we follow a default or standard deployment plan for all firewalls. It is pretty much the same for on-prem and cloud firewalls, with some differences depending on the cloud, but generally, it is the same list of things to do.

We are integrating ourselves. We did it all in-house.

From the engineering side, it reduces the amount of time I spend on doing changes on the firewalls, like adding rules, which eventually saves money for the company.

Generally, it has been fine for me. I can find my way around the price list, and it is pretty simple.

We did a comparison before we went with CloudGuard, though not for this customer. We generally researched different solutions like Palo Alto, FortiGate, Cisco, and Azure Firewall. We mostly work with Azure, so we did not look into AWS or other solutions.

We went for Check Point because of its ease of management, security features, and cost. Check Point management is way easier. It saves so much time. That is why I prefer to stick to Check Point solutions. Check Point was also one of the cheapest ones. 

The management part simplifies many things. Regarding security features, there are good competitors, and I can replace Check Point with them easily, but it is the management aspect that makes it different for me.

In terms of security threats, I have not done a lot of heavy testing on threats, but my experience is pretty much on par with Palo Alto solutions. FortiGate is a bit less, and I did not even try Cisco security. In my experience, the easy management of Check Point makes all the difference.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We are dealing with customer data, so we use a firewall to cover all API calls. If you access our sites, it will be via Check Point Firewall. Or if you send a file, it will go via Check Point Firewall.

Check Point CloudGuard provides comprehensive security coverage. The solution covers all entry points and helps manage customer data securely by covering all API calls and processing data efficiently. 

It offers alerts for suspicious activities and an automated system that updates itself to detect irregular patterns, providing notifications for possibly compromised situations.

The pricing is too high. We pay more than twenty-five thousand USD per year, which could be reduced. 

Moreover, Check Point does not initially support serverless architecture, requiring additional efforts from our team to manage it.

Our company has been using Check Point tools for five years.

There are no issues with the stability of Check Point CloudGuard.

The solution is scalable to support our growth for at least two to three more years.

Customer support is efficient with no major issues. The support team is responsive and cooperative. However, the knowledge and expertise of the professional services staff were inconsistent.

Positive

We experienced a lower pricing offer from Trend Micro, however, due to security preferences and support, we chose Check Point.

The initial setup faced challenges due to knowledge gaps on the professional services team. However, the technical side was supportive and helped address these issues.

The professional services used for implementation had inconsistent expertise, requiring involvement from our technical team to resolve gaps.

Pricing is high, over $25,000 USD annually. The package offered includes features we may not need, and more flexible licensing could be cheaper.

We considered alternatives like Trend Micro, which offered more competitive pricing.

I would recommend Check Point CloudGuard. The solution is rated eight out of ten overall.

Hybrid Cloud

Other