Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP Reviews

We have our CSPM and CNAPP services powered by CloudGuard. Those are the two that we are doing direct services for today, but as a reseller, we offer all the pillars.

We are a value-added reseller. We are not necessarily using it as our own. We are not a dev shop, but those are the use cases. If one of our customers has a dev shop and is working out of the cloud, this is where they look to get some better understanding and control over what their development team or their DevOps team is doing and building. This is where CloudGuard CNAPP comes into play.

CloudGuard CNAPP definitely helps with bringing the controls, which can then play to compliance. We have a few key customers in the utility space, so compliance is a major driver. Being able to apply required controls through CNAPP helps and benefits them.

Security is not a No, where you have to say, "No. You cannot do it." By having the CNAPP toolset for the DevOps team, you enable them to do their work, and it is securely done.

We use CloudGuard CNAPP's Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) capabilities. We have been using CSPM for just over a year. We use it internally for our own IT security. We are a company with about 75 people, and our IT security uses CSPM actively not just to respond in time but also to help manage and keep an eye on all the controls and things.

Cloud Security Posture Management identifies the risks that are most critical to our business. It helps us to prioritize those. 

We do not use CloudGuard CNAPP's CloudGuard Workload Protection capabilities. We do not have a development shop. That is where the workloads come into play, but absolutely, that is where our customers could get some of the value to be able to keep their automations and speed going by having those workload protections in place. 

It is able to bring visibility into that cloudy space where the security departments do not really see what is happening on the DevOps side. It brings visibility, security control, and standardization. These are some key features.

I am not a technical person, but generically, the user interface can be a little more intuitive. Our staff has trained network security and cloud security professionals, and they get it, but when you are trying to get to the customers to be able to pick it up and maintain it, it can be a bit difficult, so the user interface can be a little better.

We have been using CloudGuard CNAPP for just about a year.

It is a Check Point product. It is not going anywhere. We have known CSPM for years, and it has only got improved every step of the way. Our impression is that CNAPP and the other pillars will do the same. They will continue to be steady and sturdy.

Their top-end technical support is excellent. Like anything else, it is hard to get to TAC, but we are an elite partner, so we have great channel support and strategic support. We have good experience with tech support.

We have not used any other solution. We have been a Check Point customer for a long time. When it started to come out, we started to take it on.

We are primarily on Azure, but our customers are in AWS and Azure. We do not have a lot of work with Google Cloud. We have a little bit of Oracle cloud, but AWS and Azure are the two big players we see our customers using.

I am not involved in its deployment, but I know that for CSPM, which is probably related, you discover as you go. You deploy it, and you are able to get the overall insights into what the environment is. I presume you would lead with that and then work on the workload and CNAPP, but I have not had to do it myself.

We have seen an ROI, but I do not have statistics to back it. Even for our small internal IT, it helps with efficiency and reduces the time in having to go through and try to find all the misconfigurations and other things. That time is money, and that is the return on the investment, for sure. I presume our customers feel the same way when they are using and deploying, especially things related to CNAPP. Once deployed and in action, they save a lot of time because one hour of prework saves ten hours as a rework, and that is what we get with CloudGuard CNAPP.

We evaluated Orca and Wiz. We are a value-added reseller, so we do sell them. Wiz has a lot of good and competitive aspects to CloudGuard features, but CloudGuard is very competitive with them, and we are deep partners, so we lean towards that.

To those considering this solution, I would say that it is pretty easy to get it started and get the evaluation going. Check Point has a whole cloud team that is there not to sell you anything but to help find where you are in the cloud journey and bring evaluation and other things forward.

CloudGuard CNAPP is definitely in the upper echelon. I would rate it a nine out of ten. It competes very well with other solutions such as Wiz. If you break it down, it competes very well with them. That puts it right up there at the top.

I use CloudGuard CNAPP to protect and gain visibility into vulnerabilities across our cloud workloads in a multi-cloud environment spanning AWS, GCP, and Azure. By implementing CNAPP, we have successfully reduced vulnerabilities in our cloud infrastructure by 70-80% over the past two years.

CloudGuard has significantly improved our organization's security posture over the past few years by reducing critical vulnerabilities by up to 80-90% across various workloads. This enhancement has led to lower security costs and enabled us to effectively communicate our improved security stance to stakeholders, putting us in a much stronger position than before.

The most valuable features of CloudGuard CNAPP are its reporting capabilities for aggregating vulnerability information and scoring, as well as its CloudBot feature, which automates remediation deployment across our diverse workloads in various accounts and regions.

One area where CloudGuard CNAPP could be improved is in its reporting capabilities. Customization options for building tailored reports would be beneficial, as it would allow for different views on vulnerabilities based on specific criteria such as tags or dimensions. Currently, the reporting features have some limitations in providing the level of customization we require.

I have been using Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP for about three years.

We haven't had any stability issues with the solution so far.

Scalability, particularly in workload protection, is an area that needs improvement. It is challenging to roll out workload protection to different teams, and there is room for enhancement in this aspect.

I would rate Check Point's service and technical support as an eight out of ten. The pre-sales team was excellent, providing expert assistance, and our experience with the technical team has been good so far. 

Positive

The initial deployment of CloudGuard CNAPP was extremely straightforward since it is agentless and seamlessly integrates with public cloud tools. We began with a POC, then gradually rolled out the solution across all our cloud accounts, starting with AWS and expanding to GCP and Azure.

We have seen a return on investment in terms of reduced vulnerabilities.

I find CloudGuard CNAPP's pricing and licensing to be flexible, allowing us to explore new features without hard limits. Currently, we operate under an enterprise agreement with the flexibility to utilize the tools we need effectively.

We initially evaluated Palo Alto's cloud security posture management solution but ultimately chose CloudGuard CNAPP due to its faster implementation process and cohesive reporting capabilities. CloudGuard CNAPP's simplicity and comprehensive reporting aligned better with our need for efficient deployment and intuitive data analysis, making it the preferred solution for our cloud security requirements.

The benefits of using CloudGuard CNAPP were realized very quickly, almost immediately after deployment. The implementation process was straightforward and seamless, leveraging agentless integration with existing cloud security tools. The positive results were clear from the start.

We use CloudGuard CNAPP's CSPM capabilities extensively. We assess CSPM for identifying misconfigurations by running automated processes to scan all our cloud accounts. We prioritize risks, work with technical teams to explain vulnerabilities, and initiate fixing processes, deploying available solutions or performing manual/automated remediations. We then report progress to our teams and iterate on the process as needed.

The effectiveness of CloudGuard CNAPP's CSPM for providing compliance rules and security best practices is high. Its policies align well with common standards like NIST or CIS frameworks, enabling effective assessment against known vulnerabilities. This alignment facilitates communication and understanding between teams, streamlining the resolution process for identified vulnerabilities.

CloudGuard CNAPP's CSPM effectively identifies risks critical to our business, particularly focusing on exposure and availability ratings. It saves us significant time, likely reducing the resolution process for critical risks by around 30-40%, as it provides pre-configured assessments and clearer insights compared to starting from scratch.

The CloudGuard CNAPP team provides excellent visibility into incident investigations by simplifying access to cloud workload configuration logs and integrating with tools like SIEM platforms. This enables the incident response team to ingest data from CloudGuard CNAPP and correlate it with internal indicators, streamlining the investigation process.

We use CloudGuard CNAPP across eight countries in South America and North America, with around 130,000 employees and approximately 5,000 engineers. We manage over 100 AWS accounts and support various applications, including e-commerce tools, generating over 10,000 notifications.

My advice for someone evaluating CloudGuard CNAPP would be to start with a hands-on exploration of the dashboards and data provided by the solution, then focus on internal selling and localized deployments. The biggest lesson I have learned from using CNAPP is that while it is easy to start with, achieving full adoption and maximizing its potential requires thorough preparation and dedicated effort from the team.

Overall, I would rate CloudGuard CNAPP as an eight out of ten.

CloudGuard is a tool for evaluating the health and configuration of an account. We primarily use it for AWS, but we also use it for Azure. I also use it for inventory and historical reporting.

We work with 50 AWS accounts. Four teams across a couple of time zones use CloudGuard. Our security and DevOps teams are the primary users, but the support team occasionally uses it. Management consumes the output and the reports. I think it makes them feel good, so that's nice. 

I recently transitioned into a management and architecture role. CloudGuard helped me delegate to my engineers the day-to-day tasks of operational care and feeding and health assessments of the environments. I previously spent more time building rules and implementing automatic remediations. Now, I let it fly, and my engineers operate it. 

I helped with the design and build, and I was originally in charge of the run. I've now handed off the run, which enabled me to do more. I think it helped those guys to be effective and do more. I'd say it freed up the equivalent of a quarter to an eighth of an FTE.

CloudGuard allows us to scale. As we bring on customers, more accounts come online, and more platforms are deployed in our environment, I don't have to scale my team linearly with the growth of our product. These rules work over and over on the number of accounts. I think that's a place where it will help us as our customer base grows.

The security operations team saved some time. I'm on the team, so I do a lot with this. It's one of the essential tools. Depending on the incident, Check Point can be extremely helpful in understanding the configuration. I use it ad hoc or tactically in those conditions. At the same time, other operations or security incidents are out of view of Check Point and Dome9, so it doesn't come into play. When the problem is at the account or configuration level, it makes remediation and troubleshooting an investigation easier.

It saves time because I can look across the organization. Instead of checking 50 different accounts atomically and spending 15 minutes investigating each, I can spend 15 minutes exploring all 50 accounts. It allows me to quickly look across the org for similar problems when one comes up. That's a huge time saver. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to create a reference rule set and use that to evaluate an account's health. It provides daily reports on any drift from that rule set and real-time alerts. Some of the automated remediations are also helpful.

I like the GSL Builder, which helped us reduce human error. It helps answer a question quickly in real-time that I might not want to put into a specific rule that I evaluate across all my accounts all the time. In many cases, we've built rules that we consider everywhere for the posture of all our essential accounts. However, I often work on an issue or question, and I just want to see who has this configuration or misconfiguration. GSL Builder lets me quickly locate all the S3 buckets with a faulty configuration. I use it tactically like that sometimes.

I'd be sad if it went away. However, you couldn't throw an inexperienced person at it and expect them to get any value from it without some handholding or spending time to read the documentation and think about it. You must know about the asset you interrogate to write a good rule or to do a good evaluation. That isn't a Check Point problem, but it's a general issue in cloud security. 

CloudGuard offers several pre-packaged rules for various evaluations, such as NIST, 853, etc. I went through them, found 50 rules I think are handy, and put them into a custom rule set. Then, I spent time writing about 30 rules specific to my environment. I use those to evaluate the health of my accounts continuously. 

We check health insurer information because all this data is highly confidential and protected by HIPAA. We use these rules to evaluate our cloud properties constantly. I can't imagine the time that would take to perform this kind of evaluation by hand or using another tool. That's why we have Check Point.

There are many auto-remediations available. We use a few and wrote a couple of our own. It's an excellent risk management tool. We use it because we're so paranoid about the security of our environment. I've used this tool at other companies in different industries, and they've been apprehensive about automatic remediation. It depends on the part of the world you live in. I use it, and it stopped problems, so I've gotten tremendous value from auto-remediation.

The ability to prioritize alerts has been handy. It enables me to focus on critical issues instead of common misconfiguration. The visibility into my workloads is pretty good but not great. I don't use it at a granular level. I'm primarily focused on protecting my overall cloud posture and the health of the account with CloudGuard, but I also look for some common misconfigurations that might be workload-induced.

Making basic rules is easy, but it's complex if you want to do something a little more nuanced. I've been unable to make some rules that I wanted. I couldn't evaluate some values or parameters of the components I look for. I haven't always been able to assess them.

It feels like some attributes of resources can't be interrogated through the GSL the way I would like. For example, I wanted to figure out all the systems launched with a particular image that had been running for 31 days or more. Until I talked to the Dome9 people and the support team, I didn't understand how to frame that query in GSL. The support team told me how to do it, but I couldn't figure it out alone. The documentation is a little unclear about how to do some of those configurations. More tutorials and examples on the blogs and support pages would be helpful. 

I had another problem when we tried to encrypt all of our storage volumes. There is a feature called batch jobs or Elastic MapReduce jobs. CloudGuard sometimes can't detect the encryption status of the underlying disks of those systems that process my workloads. It pops up with a bunch of alerts that say, "Non-encrypted volumes have been found in your account." 

Those jobs are dynamic, so they spin up, run for an hour or two, and all the systems are destroyed. By the time I checked it, all the systems were gone. CloudGuard threw a bunch of alerts in the middle of the night when all these things happened, and I went back to evaluate the configuration. I know they were all encrypted because I can see how it was deployed. It didn't have a great insight into my actual workload, but it generally tells me when people launch unencrypted things. It isn't perfect, but it's okay.

I have used CloudGuard for four years.

CloudGuard has been solidly stable. I'd say nearly perfect.

CloudGuard's scalability is decent. They're switching to a new onboarding methodology that I'm not in love with, but I think we'll find a way to make it work and continue to scale. It has been good.

I rate Check Point's support an eight out of ten. I've contacted them with a few questions or issues and always had good support experiences with them. I'm not a huge customer paying millions of dollars a year. I work for a small startup on the bleeding edge of technology, and I feel like Check Point and Dome9 meet me where I am. 

It wasn't trying to shove a network firewall, like a data center security tool, down my throat. Palo Alto and Check Point are old-school network security appliance vendors that are out of their depth in cloud security, so they bought tools like bought Twistlock and Dome9. Check Point's acquisition and management of Dome9 have been excellent. I can still talk to people at Dome9 and get support for this tooling, but it has been difficult for me to do that with their competitors. 

Positive

I've used Palo Alto Prisma Cloud, but I've also used Palo Alto's Cloud Security Posture Management tooling. I prefer Check Point, which is why we have it.

I still have both solutions, but I use Palo Alto for something else. I use Twistlock, a Prisma Cloud module, for runtime protection of containerized workloads. I also use Dome9 for CSPM. I did not like using Prisma Cloud for CSPM because I did not care for the rule language or configuration. 

Also, I feel like Check Point, and Dome9 listen to their users. If I'm dying for a new feature to improve the solution, they would hear me out and consider it. I guarantee you that Palo Alto doesn't care.

Deploying CloudGuard is straightforward. I deployed it and configured the auto-remediation alone, but I also worked with another architect to discuss the design and workshop some ideas, so we could say a team of two deployed it.
After deployment, maintenance has been very low.

We've seen a return. It still makes sense to write a check. I can't imagine going back to doing it the way I did before. It's essential for my compliance program to have this tool in place. If I could save the $100,000 or more I pay annually and use cloud-native tools, the additional time I would spend tuning and doing everything I'm doing with CloudGuard wouldn't be worth it, at least not in the first year. 

CloudGuard is fairly priced.

I rate Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management an eight out of ten. I advise new users to start with a defined list of goals or problems and implement the solution in a way that initially prioritizes their most significant issues or primary goals. Don't try to boil the ocean. In other words, don't enable all the features and do everything at once. They will be overloaded unless they know what they're doing. Go feature by feature, function by function, and area by area. Determine where your critical risks are and implement the solution based on that knowledge.

I think there are some benefits to using a third-party tool. For example, these tools might simplify and enrich features or offer focus. You're adding another view or pane of glass to your security world, but once you start to look across clouds, it becomes interesting. I have to write all my own rules for Azure and AWS. At the same time, I can get the same report delivered to my inbox that I can then feed to my executives, showing them the health of these cloud properties. 

It looks cohesive and coherent instead of using separate native tools for AWS, GCP, Alibaba, and Azure and trying to compile all those reports and metrics. At least I can distill my posture into a commonsense readable score and transmit that to the executives. I can tell them, "Our posture's at 98% compliance." They can comprehend that and compare the scores from week to week. It helps me from a reporting angle.

We use it to protect our applications in the cloud. We are doing a lot more cloud migration. We are moving all our applications into the cloud and our servers into the cloud. We need to protect our servers in the cloud.

By implementing CloudGuard CNAPP, we wanted to make sure we get alerts so that we can react much faster.

We use CloudGuard CNAPP's Cloud Security Posture Management capabilities. It knows all the accounts that were spun up. When we create an account in the cloud, it is onboarded automatically. We pull it into automation. Whenever someone changes any settings on the infrastructure side, the posture management will flag it. Sometimes, there is a way to automate a change. If we put some settings, it can make changes right away to shut that down.

Cloud Security Posture Management has a lot of compliances. It helps us to make sure our cloud configuration is up to a certain standard. If we have to be compliant, we have a good start on where we are.

Cloud Security Posture Management identifies the risks that are most critical to our business. It gives a risk score for what is being discovered. After we have that score, it is up to us how fast we want to remediate an issue. Sometimes, we might think that it is not crucial, and we might not take immediate action on it. 

We send every finding to our backend SIEM and work with our SOC to remediate those findings. Our SOC environment has that visibility of the logs so that we can react.

We know the vulnerability in advance, so we can take some action for that vulnerability. It is mostly all about how fast we can react to something.

We could see its benefits right away after we deployed the technology. However, getting visibility does not mean that we can react fast. For that, we have to work closely with all the app guys or server guys to patch all the things after we get the visibility.

Down the road, we would like to see automation. That is probably a feature that most people want. If they can automate patching a vulnerability, it will be much easier.

I have been using CloudGuard CNAPP for about four years.

I am not aware of any problems.

So far, so good. We have plans to increase its usage, but it depends on the collaboration with multiple groups.

We have been using it with a small group in our organization. We want to make sure that this group benefits from it, and then we can use that use case and expand that use case throughout the organization. Currently, it is being used for a small group, and there is an ongoing effort to make it more visible.

They are good and responsive. We have a dedicated engineer, which is good. We have a certain person to go to for any questions or any problems. It has been good so far. Sometimes, we do experience slowness in responding, but overall, it has been pretty good.

We have been using CloudGuard from day one. It used to be known by another name. We have been using it before the name change. We are long-time customers.

Currently, we are just dealing with the public cloud. We have AWS and Azure clouds. 

Its deployment needs a lot more collaboration. From the cybersecurity side, we can only do certain things to protect our environment. From the app side, it also needs collaboration with whoever is managing that application or server. A lot of collaboration is needed rather than just having the security person.

When we get all the permission to do the deployment, it is a lot easier. The security team does not hold the key to the kingdom, so we do not have access to all environments. Once we get that access, it can be deployed a lot easily.

We have definitely seen an ROI. We have not quantified it, but the notifications about misconfiguration or vulnerabilities by CloudGuard CNAPP are helping us to improve our site. Our risk is much lower. It lowers our risk on how we do things, and sometimes, it is hard to quantify that into money.

The licensing part still needs some work. The issue that I have is that we do not use all the services in the cloud, but sometimes, CloudGuard identifies them as an asset. 

We did not explore other options. We are just leveraging what CloudGuard has.

To those evaluating this solution, I would recommend trying it. You never know what you will see until you try.

It is a good product. We definitely want to see more features. We constantly try to see the new features being integrated into the product so that we can leverage them.

We are not yet using CloudGuard CNAPP's CloudGuard Workload Protection capabilities. Because the workload side is hosted by a different group, it requires collaboration. We need to work closely with the workload group. We are looking at opportunities to see if we can collaborate.

We are not yet using CloudGuard Workload Protection for VMs, containers, and serverless, but we are interested in looking into it. If we have it, the scanning provided by CloudGuard Workload Protection will help us identify problems before they go live. I have seen a demo of it, and I am looking into whether we can deploy it for our environment. It will give our cybersecurity visibility. It will help us know what is going on, and then we can react to it.

We are also not using CloudGuard CNAPP's CloudGuard CDR (formerly Intelligence) and its intrusion detection and threat-hunting capabilities. I would love to use that and get some benefits out of it sometime in the future.

I would rate CloudGuard CNAPP an eight out of ten. Automation is what we are looking for because we do not have enough time and people to handle all the events and findings.

I assess the effectiveness of Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP in preventing misconfigurations across cloud environments as an important part.

The ability of Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP to secure multi-cloud environments has impacted my customer's compliance efforts; it is not the priority, but it is an important solution.

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP is effective. It is not as powerful as Harmony and Collaboration, but it is a challenging solution.

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP has some advantages over its competitors.

One of the best features is easy integration.

The automated threat prevention of Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP is impressive. It uses the same model and engine as antivirus or Harmony and Collaboration, making it effective.

I find false positives to be the most valuable metrics for threat detection. The number of false positives is important.

I assess the role of Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP in providing real-time visibility into cloud infrastructure depending on the client, and we usually do a business case to address that.

There is a lack of functionalities and usability. I used to compare it with another solution that is focused on specific features. All solutions have some gaps, and we are looking for the best one in every single scope.

I believe improvements could be made to the notification system, ease of use, and integrations.

The interface could be simplified and more focused on user experience. It appears somewhat unrefined in its current state.

If they improve their interface and integration capabilities, I would give them a higher rating.

The technical support provided by Check Point is really good.

I would rate their technical support as eight out of ten.

Positive

I find the initial setup easy to integrate. The main challenge is maximizing the solution's potential.

To get the full power of the solution, you need to fine-tune it extensively to achieve the expected behavior.

I consider the pricing of Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP to be average.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP a seven.

We are a VAR. We use posture management in various client environments for different assessments. 

We do not use it internally. We use it in multiple client environments. We have different types of client environments with different sizes.

It is great for identifying misconfigurations. That is the part that I love about it.  It is very good at finding that needle in the haystack. It gives you an overall posture for every little thing, and if you dive into it and look at some of the findings, you start seeing that you have one or two servers that are misconfigured, and you have an open BLOB, open storage instance, unsecured web portal, or something else that you did not know about. 

The effectiveness of its Cloud Security Posture Management for providing compliance rulesets and security best practices is great.

Its Cloud Security Posture Management helps identify the risks that are most critical to our clients relatively quickly. I cannot put a number on that, but not having to go through every little configuration on every asset would probably save a week's worth of effort for the smallest client. 

Its traffic monitoring capabilities are good. Helps visualize traffic flows and possibly exposed assets.

The actual setup is pretty manual. It takes about an hour or two, depending on the client you are working with.

The rulesets and the findings are valuable. The actual core functionality of it and the efficacy of events are great. There is some triaging, but in terms of findings, it does seem to find the needle in the haystack.

The dashboards specifically are great. By just logging in and going into the portal, we can see the high-level dashboard views. We are able to dive into whatever we want to see there, and that is fantastic.

The network mapping and the traffic flow map, where it shows you which VMs might be possibly exposed, are also very valuable. It shows which systems might have direct access to the Internet and which systems do not. It shows you overall how the network flow is set up based on your security groups, routing, and everything. I have got a good use out of that.

The setup can be better. With every other Check Point SaaS product, the setup is scripted. You just approve deployment scripts,  and then you are off. The setup for this solution is still very much manual. I would like to see that transition to more of a scripted setup. That has been an issue when I set up a client because every client has different skill sets.

The general reporting also needs improvement. It is very cumbersome to pull the reports for big environments. I had a client environment with 50 tenants, and I had to manually run a CIS report for each tenant and download it. There were 50 different reports. I wish there was a way to get the reports for all 50 tenants in one report and not 50 different reports.

I have been working with posture management for 3 to 4 years.

I never had stability-related issues. That has always been fine.

It is scalable. You can do it, but you need to redo the setup for each and every additional account and visibility. It is scalable. It is just not quickly scalable.

I would rate their support for CloudGuard CNAPP a eight out of ten.

Positive

I have not used a posture management solution before.

Its setup is very manual. I would like to see that transition to more of a scripted setup. It is a very manual process. For the most part it is fine however I have definitely had issues with it. Sometimes, it just does not work, and I have had to open tickets.

I am an integrator and consultant.

Its price is very fair.

N/A

To the new users of this solution, I would advise not following the built-in guide while setting it up. Always open the admin guide for the most up-to-date information.

Overall, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. Even with all the issues, what you do get out of it is very valuable. The reporting and the setup are holding it back from a ten. That is where it can be improved greatly.

CloudGuard is a posture management and workload protection platform. We're also using it for data and risk management.

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. 

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.

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.

I have used CloudGuard for 14 months.

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.

We don't have any issues with CloudGuard's performance or scalability. 

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. 

Positive

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.

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.

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.

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.

When a customer has a multi-cloud environment with AWS, Azure, GCP, or any other cloud, maintaining posture across the cloud environment is very difficult. They need a CNAPP solution for governance and centralized compliance. It gives centralized visibility where they can track each and every cloud account, compliance check, misconfigurations, risks, and vulnerabilities. Accordingly, they can take remediation action as well. That is the main purpose of a CNAPP solution.

CloudGuard CNAPP helps to be compliant across a multi-tenant environment. We can be sure of the compliance status with respect to different cloud tenants. There is visibility into each and every cloud tenant. It is very easy to get visibility from a single console. Centralized management gives good granular control where we can check the risks and vulnerabilities and also do remediation centrally.

Its benefits can be realized in four weeks. It is API integration, so it is very straightforward. You integrate with the client, and you start monitoring. You get the information in real-time. The overall implementation time frame is about four weeks. The first two weeks can be for the monitoring stage. In the third week, you can fine-tune your policies, and in the fourth week, you can start remediating.

Posture management is a part of CloudGuard CNAPP. CloudGuard CNAPP is a combination of three technologies: Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Workload Protection (CWP), and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM). It is a combination of technologies. When customers use CloudGuard CNAPP, they use all these three models.

Cloud Security Posture Management is very good for identifying misconfiguration. It is able to capture all misconfigurations.

They maintain different compliance standards. Apart from that, they are also very good with the alerts and notification part. Whenever they perform a scan and find a vulnerability, it is sent to different channels as an alert or notification. It is good. They only need to improve the impact analysis on CSPM.

Cloud Security Posture Management identifies the risks that are most critical to the business. In terms of time savings, it can identify a risk within 10 to 15 minutes instead of it being a day-long task. The scanning happens in almost real-time. It is a good feature they have given, and I appreciate their solution.

The scanning provided by CloudGuard Workload Protection helps to identify problems before they go live. It has good capability for that. It can perform a proactive analysis, and we can identify the risks or vulnerabilities before the exploit. This identification of problems is very important because knowing about a problematic scenario in advance and being able to address it can save us a huge business loss. A proactive analysis is very critical. In the cybersecurity domain, it is one of the critical features for every customer.

CloudGuard CNAPP gives us the severity score. When it identifies any risks or vulnerabilities, it assigns a severity score.

CloudGuard CNAPP gives good visibility across all the multi-cloud tenants. We have everything covered in one solution. It covers risks, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, compliance, data security, data loss, etc. It gives good visibility. This visibility is important for customers.

The identification of misconfigurations, maintenance of compliance in a centralized way, and visibility across all the multi-cloud tenants are the key functionalities.

The first improvement area is the impact analysis. The impact analysis that they perform can be improved. It is currently lacking. It should be more detailed.

The second improvement area is that they should adopt more remediation on various resources.

The third improvement area is that they should introduce Gen-AI capability on their platform so that remediation can be very easy. They have the threat hunting and detection part, but they need to adapt more on the Gen-AI side so that the remediation can happen automatically. People should be able to do remediation with a click. It would be a very good feature to have for remediation.

These are three main improvement areas for them. I have already provided Check Point feedback about these through another channel.

With respect to Cloud Workload Protection, they should introduce more granular security control in terms of policy. I feel they should work on it and develop it more. They need to provide more granular security control in terms of various attacks, such as the MITRE ATT&CK framework. They need to give a different policy for each technique and tactic such as ransomware, exploitation, etc. I also work with CrowdStrike, so I know about different types of granular controls. From the Cloud Workload Protection perspective, they need to improve the policy framework.

I have been working with CloudGuard CNAPP for 2 years.

I have not seen any issues. It works in the passive mode, so it does not impact performance or anything like that.

It is a scalable solution. Every SaaS solution is scalable, so CloudGuard CNAPP is also a scalable solution.

I have not contacted them much, which is a good thing. CloudGuard CNAPP works in a passive mode. If anything needs to be done, it has to be done in your cloud tenant. There are very few times when you or an admin is required to communicate with the support team.

I also work with CrowdStrike and Palo Alto. CrowdStrike does not have the CNAPP capability. CrowdStrike is an EDR solution.

Palo Alto has the Prisma solution. Its capabilities are similar to Check Point. They are similar to me. I do not see much difference. There might be some difference in the cost, but technology-wise, they are the same.

CloudGuard CNAPP is a SaaS-based solution, and you need to integrate all your cloud accounts into that. That is it.

You need to integrate your cloud account or onboard your cloud account in the CloudGuard CNAPP solution by doing the API integration. After you onboard, you first put the cloud account in the monitoring mode. You monitor things for two weeks. After you validate your findings on CloudGuard CNAPP and you do not see any false positives, you can go for the block mode as well. That is the approach the industry should follow while onboarding any CNAPP solution.

You start to get an ROI from the day you deploy CloudGuard CNAPP or integrate it with your cloud account. 

It is like insurance. When something happens, only then you realize its value. CloudGuard CNAPP works in the same way. Without such a solution, it is very difficult to find vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and data breaches on each and every cloud tenant. When you integrate CloudGuard CNAPP with your cloud account, you get a single view. It is very easy for your cloud administrator to take quick action. The ROI starts once you integrate or onboard a cloud account with CloudGuard CNAPP.

After you have subscribed to CloudGuard CNAPP, I would advise onboarding your cloud account and then monitoring your cloud account and the CloudGuard CNAPP findings for two weeks. After that, you can fine-tune the policies and then run the solution in block mode. That is the process.

A CNAPP product is mandatory for any organization that works in a multi-cloud environment.

Overall, I would rate CloudGuard CNAPP a nine out of ten.