Check Point Application Control Reviews

The primary use case of Check Point Application Control is to enhance network security by providing granular control over applications and web traffic. It prevents unauthorized access by allowing or blocking applications based on predefined policies, ensuring that only authorized applications are used within the network. 

Additionally, it improves productivity by restricting access to non-business-related applications and websites, helps maintain compliance with regulatory requirements and internal policies by monitoring and controlling application usage, and mitigates risks by detecting and preventing the use of high-risk applications, thereby reducing the likelihood of malware and data breaches. 

This comprehensive control over application usage makes us more secure and efficient. 

The solution allows us to enforce policies that ensure only authorized applications are used, reducing the attack surface for potential threats such as malware. Restricting access to non-business-related applications and websites helps boost employee productivity and focus. 

Moreover, the solution aids in maintaining regulatory compliance by monitoring and controlling application usage, ensuring sensitive data is protected according to our standards. 

Overall, Check Point Application Control contributes to a more secure IT environment, enhances operational efficiency, and supports compliance efforts, ultimately safeguarding our organization's assets and reputation.

The application control capabilities allow for precise management of which applications can access the network, helping to prevent unauthorized or risky applications from compromising security. This feature enhances network protection and supports regulatory compliance efforts by ensuring that only approved applications are used. 

Additionally, the solution's ability to categorize and prioritize applications based on their risk levels enables us to allocate resources more effectively, focusing on mitigating the most significant threats first. 

Furthermore, the real-time monitoring and reporting functionalities provide visibility into application usage patterns and potential security incidents, enabling proactive responses to emerging threats.

Firstly, enhancing the user interface and overall user experience could simplify configuration and management tasks, making it more intuitive for administrators to navigate and utilize the solution effectively. 

Additionally, improving the scalability and performance to handle larger networks and increasing traffic volumes would ensure consistent reliability under heavy usage conditions.

Looking forward, additional features that could enhance Check Point Application Control in future releases might include more advanced machine learning and AI capabilities for threat detection and anomaly detection within application traffic. 

Integration with cloud services and applications, as well as enhanced reporting and analytics functionalities, could provide deeper insights into application usage patterns and security posture.

I've used the solution for three years.

Its ability to effectively enforce application policies without causing disruptions to network operations. 

It maintains stability even during periods of high network traffic or when handling a wide variety of applications. 

The scalability of Check Point Application Control can be influenced by factors such as hardware resources, network complexity, and the number of concurrent users and applications. 

Organizations with very large networks or high traffic volumes may need to ensure adequate hardware resources and optimization of configurations to maintain optimal performance and scalability.

Technical support was not as expected.

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The initial setup was complex.

We implemented the solution via the vendor.

By effectively managing and controlling application usage, we are reducing the risk of security breaches and data loss. This can lead to potential savings associated with avoiding financial penalties, reputational damage, and remediation costs related to security incidents. 

The setup cost is reasonable. That said, pricing should be reduced further. 

We did evaluate Fortigate.

This solution is meeting all our expectations; support and subscriptions should be taken into account. 

We use Check Point Application Control to control VPN and bandwidth. 

The tool's most valuable features are VPN access, website defense, and maintenance. 

Check Point Application Control needs to ensure that they release up-to-date security patches regularly. It should release better documentation so end-users can use the product without depending on the support team. 

I have been working with the product for three years. 

Check Point Application Control's stability is good. 

The tool is scalable. My company has 1000 users. 

The tool's support is good. 

Positive

You need guidance to do the product's deployment. It cannot be done directly. You need two people to handle the deployment. 

Check Point Application Control is expensive. The tool's licensing costs are yearly. 

I rate the product an eight out of ten. 

It helps us to discover applications that run across the organization network and admin accounts that are generated within the ecosystem. 

Monitoring the performance of applications has been easy since we deployed this platform. 

Check Point Application Control gives the IT team permission to deploy and assign tasks to various apps. 

It gives us the authority to eliminate unnecessary admin accounts and blacklist applications that are not required anymore. It protects apps from malware attacks with powerful security tools.

Setting up new applications and testing the suitability of deployed tools has been efficient since we deployed this platform. 

It blocks ransomware attacks that can affect performance-enhancing secure work environments with zero-day attacks. 

We are able to manage workstations and servers across remote offices with a unified control system. Setting up a default system for allowing applications that are useful and blocking untrusted platforms has saved time and cost. 

This product has enabled my web development team to set reliable control policies for managing applications.

Policy management features have enabled the organization to set up achievable goals and programs that can be implemented successfully. 

The security systems prevent external attacks from affecting workflows and compromising data. 

Customization has enabled us to create policies that can easily meet our requirements with flexible features. 

The overall cost of deployment and maintenance has been efficient and affordable. Application blacklisting helps us to filter our tedious apps that can negatively affect operations. 

The current features have great performance capabilities and have highly boosted production in the organization. I recommend network upgrades in the next release to meet most company demands and daily changes. 

The performance has been stable, and we really appreciate the great results. The security tools and policy enhancement tools perform effectively. The overall productivity of the current features is excellent, and I recommend the use of this product to other companies. 

We have longed for a reliable Application Control platform for a long time, and finally, we have received the best solution.

I've used the solution for two years.

This tool is highly stable.

I am impressed by the product's great performance.

The customer support staff responds effectively.

Positive

I have not worked with any other similar solution before.

The setup was straightforward.

Implementation took place through the vendor.

ROI has grown from 40% to 65% from the previous year.

The cost and licensing terms have been reliable.

I settled on this product due to its stable performance after evaluating several products.

I highly recommend the use of this product to other organizations for reliable application control services.

Check Point Application Control enables my team to customize websites to fit our daily needs. It provides security measures that can be set in place to safeguard our content and internal information. 

It provides reliable tools for setting up HTTPS security policies that prevent security risks related to SSL protocol. The product provides real-time insights into the data traffic from the applications and their performance. 

The security protocols have enabled my team to set restrictions for accessing confidential information.

There is efficient protection of data and workflows from external interferences. This platform provides basic tools for protecting applications from cyber attacks and building strong websites. 

The SmartView tracker enables my members to monitor data traffic across the applications. It has provided a great opportunity for us to set up basic rules for interacting with applications. 

This product provides reliable data controls that monitor the performance and operational capability of all the applications within the company's networking infrastructure.

The central management system provides a reliable platform for application control and URL filtering. 

The security gateways have set comprehensive security tools for protecting data from malware attacks. 

The application library can run many apps and websites at the same time without functional complications. 

The application control system blocks internet sites and cyber attacks that can affect daily operations. 

SmartEvent Analysis provides capabilities for understanding application performance with charts and reporting analytics.

The most set features have enhanced the effective management of workflows. 

Malware threats can advance attacks when there are no timely measures to curb online phishing attacks. 

The solution needs an efficient monitoring platform that provides individual employee data, and performance will boost productivity in the organization. 

Most features perform well since there are few complaints. The security tools should be empowered more to fit daily demands and prevent our systems from advanced threats. 

I recommend the use of this platform to other organizations for reliable application performance.

I've used the solution for two years. 

The application security controls and monitoring tools are powerful.

I am impressed by its great performance.

The customer support staff has been reliable and committed to great service delivery.

Positive

I have not worked with a similar solution.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The implementation was done by the vendor team, and their level of expertise is excellent.

The recorded ROI has improved from 40% to 65% currently.

The setup cost and licensing terms are efficient.

I evaluated other application control products, however, Check Point Application Control was the best.

This is great system for monitoring application performance and I recommend to others.

We needed to allow, control, block, and access specific applications based on the policies that the institution has as a baseline. Given this need, we have tried, analyzed, and tested various solutions that could comply with said internal directive. We have sought solutions that allow us greater visibility and control over applications on the network, improving the protection of applications and the security of the organization in general. We've validated the software's great potential at detecting malicious events on unauthorized applications or resources. 

Check Point Application Control has offered us the possibility of achieving several important organizational pillars that were required to cover. We had application identification, application control, and protection based on known or unknown threats. 

These capabilities have allowed us to discover known or unknown threats by detecting them under the identity of users. We managed to include a malware intrusion detection index based on the identity of the users in order to protect them. 

One of the greatest capacities and the benefits it gives us is the ability to control applications based on defining access or denial policies in specific applications, groups, or category profiles. Compared to other products, it has offered us a unique combination by allowing the integration of third-party services or brand-owned services, which gives us a chance to insure, protect ourselves, and generate scalable, comprehensive protection. 

One of the improvements that we need is in the manual services. The guides used today are a bit complex, and we need efficient and simple access to them so that any administrative or technical person can solve, analyze, and configure each of the rules and identities seamlessly. We need clear directions to help us configure effectively. It's important to be able to have this documentation available to make the many available features easy to configure and allow us to promote defense tactics in depth against all available threats. 

I've used the solution for two years.

The primary use case for application control in our organization is to provide the ability to restrict users from using unapproved applications and applications that fall under categories that are deemed malicious. 

Application control is enabled on all of our HA firewall clusters globally. Leveraging identity awareness, we can restrict remote access applications from the rest of the organization, allowing it for specific teams that require it, i.e., IT Helpdesk and Technical Support teams.

Application Control has improved our organization by enabling other network administrators and me to restrict non-corporate applications for specific departments. 

Combined with Check Points URL filtering, this blade provides more granular restriction as if the firewall engine does not detect the application, administrators have the ability to use regular expressions to block URLs that are critical for the application to function. For example, the Windows Quick Assist tool needed URL filtering as it was not being detected and categorized as "Remote Assistance"

The ability to be able to do dynamic rate limiting on specific applications has been a valuable feature. 

This has allowed us to prevent our graphics team from saturating our link to the internet by rate-limiting their uploads to third-party cloud providers (i.e., Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc.). 

The fact that application control also can stop browser-based extensions/widgets has also been very valuable as it has provided insight to employees installing VPN extensions on their browsers. 

This blade is very valuable to any organization, and it is great that it is included in the base firewall licensing bundle. 

It is very easy to set up and configure. The one feature that could be improved would be the ability to see implicit rules that are defaulted on the policy. For example, if the cleanup rule is removed, there is still another toggle in the settings that (in the event the traffic does not match any of the rules) you can either choose to block the traffic or allow it. By default, this setting is configured to drop, which caused issues the first time we configured the policy as this was not shown.

I've used the solution for five years.

The solution is stable and hasn't increased the load drastically.

Scalability is excellent and is easy to add new sites.

Technical support is hit or miss. L1 and L2 never seem to be able to solve my issues. We always need to go to L3 support.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

The solution should be configured by default with an allow rule that can be changed to drop once implemented to avoid massive disruptions to users.

We handled the solution in-house.

The ROI we see is in the added security to block specific applications or categories.

The setup is easy. However if first implemented, it's a good idea to add a "clean up" rule at the bottom rather than denying. This will allow the traffic and you can further tweak rules without impacting users.

We did not evaluate other options. 

The product is great.

We needed a solution that would allow us to protect the applications that we were constantly developing. Those applications needed to be classified by categories, including integrity, risk level, and productivity issues, as well as identity per user. We needed all these characteristics to safeguard a library, repository, or platform that could allow us to manage it in a secure, fast, and scalable way. We tried more than one solution that would allow us the required granularity in the teams and management so that we could implement it according to the regulations that we had internally.

At the time of implementation, we had a great feeling of satisfaction with the solution as it allowed us to have granularity across types of applications - by the network, identity, social networks, the function of the application, et cetera. We were able to do more than what we really needed, and this gave us that feeling that we now had the internal compliance that we did not have before. The libraries are much larger and grouped by application in categories to protect us from attacks or threats.

The most outstanding feature is the Check Point APK wiki, which is a product that is incorporated into the solution that allows us to naturally and dynamically apply internal applications to the application database. It is continuously updated, which allows us to have constant detection capabilities and more than 8000 different applications at different sites. It allows us to be more dynamic and have greater control. Additionally, it has blocking via content filtering or HTTPS inspection, which we can combine with identity. That gives us a more centralized correlation and management for more granular policies and more expeditious control over each activity from the users.

The blocking characteristics for filtering content currently are not so customizable. I would like to be able to modify them a bit. I hope that customization will be incorporated in the future. Right now, we must educate the users who are constantly violating or in fear of violating an issue. We would like to be able to incorporate filtering with notifications in a learning portal so users can be educated and will no longer have a lack of experience. A portal will help make better, more educated, and knowledgeable users. 

I've used the solution for two years.

Our primary use case of Check Point Application Control is to filter which application categories we want to allow our organization members to have access to so that they are secured. 

For example, we don't allow access to malicious applications and some categories that could be threats. We only allow organization members to access secure applications and applications that are aligned with the company's strategy. 

The user interface is easy and dynamic. You can drag objects around the screen to facilitate their use. Besides, it is quite easy to understand and apply changes.

It also enables us to save internet bandwidth by filtering applications that are not work-related and helps us to easily create granular policies based on users to identify the usage of applications.

We can easily switch from a classical firewall to a next-gen firewall using application security. 

We implemented application control at MDM global security policies, which helps us set general security standards for all managed devices. 

Identity awareness module integration is to be used for user/group-based controls.

Application control and having features like completeness and validity, identification, authentication, and granularity with unified layers is awesome. The most important aspect is that it allows users to define policies based on source IP and user role, quickly identifying traffic flow with SAML.

You can allow or block traffic coming or going out to the internet for specific applications or websites.

It offers user notifications for blocked access, time-defined policies, and bulk categorization of malicious applications.

Sometimes, documentation is not accurate and with the support issue we have to wait a long time for an engineer to understand the errors. I would like to see if they can help with the issue of service and more qualified staff. They need to have good service with Check Point products.

The load balancer functionality for application traffic might be a better option.

Configuration and deployment are a little bit difficult. 

This product works only when the user is in traffic flow through NGFW. 

Sometimes there are more than one category tag to an application which can be tricky.

We have been using the product for more than 12.5 years.

We are satisfied with the stability.

We are satisfied with the scalability.

The product provides the largest database about application control and we can create granular policies to identify the usage. Overall it's been a very good experience, working with this product.

Positive

We didn't use any solutions previously. Check Point Application Control is easy and user-friendly. We're able to control and manage all applications with it.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The help we had was excellent.

The pricing has to be more economical.

On our infrastructure, we installed the Check Point 6200 appliance as our primary firewall. It is deployed in a distributed mode, with the security gateway and management running on separate machines.

Our major purpose is to limit web access from internal networks.

Using application control, we blocked the use of peer-to-peer applications such as torrent from our networks and allowed only youtube.com from the media streaming category, resulting in a significant improvement in bandwidth.

Aside from these numerous categories, we blocked a large number of high-risk applications from access our network.

We can control bandwidth and high-risk application access from our network using application control.

We want our users to only be able to access certain websites during working hours. We accomplished this through application control by blocking social media, phonography, drugs, media sharing, and other sites.

We also restricted file sharing sites through application control and blocked file uploading, which helped us avoid data loss.

We set a usage limit for YouTube.com, giving us more bandwidth control.

The control options for an application are very specialized. We may thus ultimately decide what to access and what to prevent.

It is relatively easy to implement an application control policy, and it is made to integrate with the access policy.

The ability to see each application clearly in the logs is quite helpful.

Application control utilizes signatures similarly to how IPS does. It is an excellent feature.

It's pretty easy to schedule updates to the application control database. We can design a check for fresh updates every two hours.

Users can clearly understand the reasons for site blocking from the blocked message.

1 – Custom applications for internal applications must be defined frequently. This should be improved. It would be much better if Check Point could detect internal applications and automatically bypass them.

2- Without HTTPS decryption, the majority of App Control recognition features will be rendered ineffective, as everything has been encrypted thus far.

3-An application may have multiple category tags, which is confusing.

These areas should be improved. 

It satisfies all of our needs except for this. 

Check Point Application Control assists us in controlling bandwidth and restricting internet access for our infrastructure.

I've used the solution for almost two years.

Yes, we used a different solution. However, it did not satisfy us in terms of security. As a result, we decided to deploy Check Point NGFW for enhanced security.

Before migrating to Check Point firewall, we conducted market research and solicited feedback from my contacts who are already Checkpoint NGFW customers. We decided to use Check Point NGFW as a result of this.

Our ROI is that it increases the security precautions that prevent users from accessing websites that can harm our business. Additionally, it also reduces the use of the internet, which is often unrelated to business tasks.

Our use case for Check Point Application Control is to be able to filter and control all the categories of applications that we want to allow in our organization so that users have the necessary access and permissions and have security in using an application. 

We only allow members of the organization access secure applications, another benefit is that bandwidth can be limited by restricting applications and unnecessary downloads of applications that are not for business use by controlling the access of gateway apps

Check Point Application Control has provided us as an organization with the ability to prevent users from entering web pages that are not allowed or that can lead to many vulnerabilities that could result in the loss of sensitive information.

With this friendly, simple, and easy-to-use tool, we have been able to control all these inappropriate accesses. Most users cannot enter sites or applications that are not for work and with this, we have been able to monitor all these pages.

It also helps us implement changes very quickly and make people more focused on work.

All Check Point Application Control features are very granular and important. The most important depends on the need of the company this feature is used.

It also has flexibility where you can restrict certain areas of each page. For example, you can enter but not download or use a chat like in social networks. I can see them, however, not chat. This is a good thing as you can be flexible with your employees to have everything without access and allows us to be flexible with certain categories. I think that with this we can achieve a better tool

The tool has a number of features necessary for good business security. However, it is always good to add several features and maintain an open and adequate performance for the machines where said software is installed since it will be able to present high performance. However, so far, Check Point Application Control satisfactorily meets the needs of a company in security. At the moment I don't see the need to add new features. That said, you always have to be one step ahead.
They should focus on improving the guides since they are not very friendly or concrete to make a configuration in the interface.

This tool has been used for 2 years.

The solution is very stable. No problem has been presented.

The solution provides important scalability features

Since the product has worked well, we have had little interaction with Check Point's customer service.

Positive

Previously, we did not use another tool.

The implementation, like all Check Point products, is very interactive and easy to install and configure.

It was done with a vendor and it was very good in its work until now.

Our ROI is that our entire platform meets the necessary security requirements. Nothing happens in the company's infrastructure and this helps us avoid more expenses if not for having implemented a tool like this.

The price is in line with the competition. They maintain an accessible and competitive price.

Options were not evaluated since our infrastructure always used Check Point.

They continue to innovate. Check Point is an excellent tool in many areas.