What is our primary use case?
CloudGuard is a posture management and workload protection platform. We're also using it for data and risk management.
How has it helped my organization?
Our environment includes a hybrid cloud and three public cloud providers: GCP, AWS, and Azure. CloudGuard enables us to manage all the cloud providers from one dashboard. It enables a team approach, so we're more flexible and operationally efficient. The solution provides a holistic view from a single dashboard, making posture management and threat prevention more effective. Detection is not a significant challenge. When I block a particular incident, CloudGuard will implement some kind of prevention activity so that those types of activities are prevented automatically in the future. Prevention is more beneficial for us.
When managing our service partner, CloudGuard enables easier enrollment and allows us to consolidate all those rules and privileges. It will give them complete visibility of the identities that I am using for all the services, whether it's privileged user access or a normal user. It's based on user suggestions. CloudGuard helps me handle my user identities.
Another benefit is posture management. We are governed by four regulatory entities in India. We need to stay in 100 percent compliance by avoiding any misconfigurations on our platforms, and this tool helps us. It also helps with virtual protection of our code by adding another layer of security and an extra step. It can detect abnormalities in the image and register, enabling us to identify and fix compromised packages before any major release.
As a regulated entity, we receive a monthly external audit from the agency, and we always pass them using CloudGuard because we have a single dashboard for multiple services for user activity reviews and policies that we have set for the user levels. It's easy to demonstrate our compliance posture using this portal and any incidents with compromised credentials or NetFlow security.
CloudGuard allows us to do more work with fewer people. A team of six people can manage our entire enrollment. CloudGuard covers a huge footprint. It saves a lot of resources, but I cannot measure that in time saved. Onboarding and learning the product took six months, and it took us another year to address all of the solution's findings. The third year should be focused on monitoring. I can't quantify how much time is consumed in days or weeks, but if I had to rate it on a scale of one to 10, I would say nine.
A reduction in human error is part of posture management. When we first onboarded to the posture management platform, we had to customize and build some rules for enrollment. We fixed the issues we found, and we don't need to run the posture management tool again. Instead, we run the GSL builder and cross-check the findings. Before addressing the finding, we must create a default rule set in the GSL Builder. We copy what's in the builder and execute it on a particular enrollment, and we'll say it is good to go. We can save time building custom rulesets with GSL builder, but it's hard to say how much.
What is most valuable?
We like the GSL Builder feature. When you're running a security operations center, you spend a lot of time monitoring endpoint activity to ensure there is no malicious traffic or anonymous access in the environment. The GSL Builder is helpful for deep investigations of a particular reason for an incident. You can use it to get more information.
We have more than 30 AWS accounts and use more than 16 versions with some different tenants. I don't want to turn on each enrollment and app one at a time in the application. With GSL Builder, I can select multiple accounts from one place and execute the commands. I can see the results of which entities passed and failed.
It's easy to write custom rules and policies. I have limited coding knowledge, but I can make policies from inside the UI. It will show what services are available in the cloud provider, and I can go through and check the ones I need. It requires no scripting knowledge. If you have experience in the industry, you can immediately learn GSL Builder and adapt it.
Auto-remediation is a module you can enable at the enrollment level. It detects and fixes human errors or misconfigurations. For example, we can't create a bucket that is exposed to the internet for compliance reasons. CloudGuard can prevent that bucket from being created, ensuring compliance.
With effective risk management, we can identify every asset and assign a score to each network violation or process. We will flag the most critical assets and bring them to private subnets. There's also a graph, which is useful if we need to explain things to developers and administrators.
What needs improvement?
The user interface could be improved. Sometimes, the visibility is not immediately available for the environment. We have the native servers that come with the solutions, but we cannot see them in the Check Point log. Another issue is with the integrated file monitoring. It would make sense to have stuff like file integrity monitoring and malware scanning available within this module because we don't want to integrate another product.
For example, let's say it's showing a process violation. It should be able to do some additional malware scanning in that particular bucket to get some additional information. I don't want to integrate with another third-party tool or go to the native server to check something. It would be helpful to have integrated monitoring and malware scanning for the file types.
There are a few flaws with the security management portal where I have limited visibility into the workload protection features. There is no error visibility where I can see the communication and workflow between services. Some of the dashboards need to be fine-tuned if they are not customized. For example, I cannot customize anything on the effective risk management dashboard. Some of the information is not correct for my tenant. With respect to passwords and user management, there are no policies I can measure at the user level. If the user was created more than six months ago, you don't need to worry about that password or do anything like two-factor authentication associated with that user. They can still log in after six months or one year.
It's also a challenge to use CloudGuard's agentless workload posture with AWS. An Azure storage is summed up with a CNAPP encryption by default. We tried onboarding this data, but the problem is the attachment is not done. After a few days, we identified that it was impossible to do the encryption detection. But CloudGuard's default rules say that this has to be encrypted.
The AWS module says that we cannot access this volume with this encryption, so we cannot use an agentless workload posture with AWS because of this. It is a best practice to ensure that all the volumes are being encrypted. Without the encryption, how can I do this? It is a big challenge for CloudGuard.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used CloudGuard for 14 months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We only see downtime when there is a global outage. It typically only lasts a few minutes. Also, we sometimes see latency issues when accessing this portal. We double-checked that with the team also, and they asked us to check on our network side. We are in the office network, so we could not refer to that.
Some of CloudGuard's modules are slower. For example, if I go and click on the posture, it loads immediately within 30 or 50 seconds, but workload protection might take more than a minute. There are some differences in the latency between the services within the cloud version.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We don't have any issues with CloudGuard's performance or scalability.
How are customer service and support?
I rate Check Point support 10 out of 10. Their customer service is fantastic. We have premium support, so I don't know what their standard support is like. When we open a ticket, they immediately call us back regardless of the severity.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have Prisma Cloud, which is not fully implemented, so we need to use Check Point simultaneously. Prisma Cloud excels in terms of UA, visibility, and user-level policies and management. CloudGuard is more cost-efficient but not as user-friendly as Palo Alto. At the same time, having the GSL Builder makes it more efficient to make CNAPP rules without much background knowledge.
How was the initial setup?
Generally, the deployment is pretty easy. We have a template, so it's automatic. However, we run into problems when we're supporting multiple CSPs. AWS supports CloudGuard 100 percent, whereas for Azure, it's 75 or 80 percent. Some Azure services, like user identity, are not supported, which is a challenge. It should be available in Q1.
Deploying the threat intelligence for AWS was fine, but we had problems with Azure. I'm part of the security group, which is onboarded into the AWS. The next time I create a new security group, it automatically discovers the asset and will put it in the log. For Azure, a new network security group must be added manually. If I'm doing that manually, I want to completely remove the onboarded threat intelligence, which means I want to completely remove what we added from the portal. That is one problem we face doing the onboarding of Azure.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I don't know the initial proposed amount, but the procurement team looked at the market and compared Prisma and CloudGuard, then settled on one solution.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP nine out of 10. Any advice I could give to potential users would be completely based on their use cases. You must look at various criteria, like your environment and enrollment level, but my general advice for implementing a CNAPP solution is to get a cloud dev.
If you are using AWS with multiple CNAPPs and you don't have a control tower or any other landings in the budget, you want to do policies at each enrollment level. But we're using this out that what we do is, like, we build guardrails where we can apply it at the enterprise level itself.
For example, we'd want to allow any data to be researched outside the area. I'll create one policy and apply it at the organizational level. I set a policy so that any user in my enrollment could not create an SD bucket or any volumes outside using their agent. If you have multiple CSPs, AWS accounts, or Azure subscriptions, this is one solution where you can cover your entire organization's accounts.
