Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP Reviews

We use Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management to maintain our organization's security posture.

With a bit of upscaling, it is possible to write custom rules and policies using the GSL Builder. We used the GSL Builder to build the rules for our playground environment and internet-facing environments.

It takes a couple of weeks for a nontechnical person to learn how to use GSL Builder.

The Unified Security Management console is helpful because it provides a single pane of glass. 

From a control plane perspective, the solution offers excellent visibility into our framework, enabling the identification of non-compliance.

CloudGuard provides good value for money in terms of automating our security across multiple clouds.

The agentless workload posture analysis, which primarily focuses on our cloud platform, provided valuable insights into our organization's overall security posture.

CloudGuard helped to eliminate some manual processes for a few teams, freeing up some of their time.

Our organization's security operations were able to save time by using CloudGuard's unified platform.

The most valuable feature is the ability to apply common tools across all accounts.

The integration process could be enhanced by enabling integration at the organizational level rather than requiring the manual setup of individual accounts. The current workflow of creating and linking each role is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Streamlining account onboarding by allowing CloudGuard to identify and integrate at the organizational level would significantly simplify the process.

I have been using Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management for one year.

Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management is stable.

CloudGuard Posture Management is scalable, as it is a SaaS product.

Before implementing Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management, we relied on the native CSPM of AWS Config.

For beginners in the field, AWS might be a good starting point due to its simplicity. However, for more experienced users who require more advanced features, CloudGuard offers a more mature and comprehensive solution.

I would give Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management a rating of seven out of ten. Consolidating additional capabilities into CloudGuard, along with Fusion, would create a comprehensive package offering for customers. This, along with maintaining compatibility with the evolving AWS service, would help to avoid complicating any integration issues.

While developing our tools, there is always a need for ongoing review and updates. However, compared to AWS, the maintenance required for CloudGuard is minimal.

Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management is utilized to monitor our various cloud-related portals on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and other platforms. This solution offers a unified console to manage all the servers and provide us with comprehensive details.

We can automate certain aspects of our security through Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management. However, complete automation is not possible due to the dependencies of the applications installed in the cloud VMs.

The agentless workload posture enhances the compatibility of our VMs since there's no requirement to install any agents or assign write permissions. This approach also simplifies management, reduces the need for multiple levels of approvals, and eliminates the necessity of installing anything on our servers.

Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management saves us time by enabling communication with all of our devices within a span of two days.

CloudGuard Posture Management's unified platform has saved our organization time when dealing with our cloud environment.

The visibility in our cloud environment is the most valuable feature.

We have concerns regarding the pricing and would appreciate seeing some improvements.

We are currently conducting a POC with Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management and have been testing it for one month.

I would give the stability an eight out of ten.

The technical support is good.

Positive

The price is on the higher end.

I would rate Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management eight out of ten.

As a manufacturing company, we always ensure our production and workloads are not being interrupted by anything. Therefore, we are making sure our automated processes are not hindered by any means. 

As we have many cloud-based applications, CloudGuard gives us prime support in terms of the security of the system. This includes securing cloud workloads, applications, and data by integrating threat prevention, detection, and response capabilities. 

It also ensures compliance and governance across multi-cloud environments.

It provides complete visibility and control over cloud-native applications and infrastructure, allowing our security teams to monitor and manage every part of their cloud environments. 

CloudGuard CNAPP also assures compliance with industry standards and regulatory requirements by automating governance and risk management procedures. This streamlines security management and lowers the operational strain on our IT teams, allowing them to focus on strategic goals. We are able to work freely by putting aside some additional stress.

The most useful element of Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP is its advanced threat prevention capabilities. This functionality is vital because it proactively addresses security issues before they affect cloud applications and notifies a real-time incident, ensuring the integrity and availability of critical services. 

Furthermore, the platform's full visibility and control across many cloud environments allows us to effectively monitor the security posture, uncover vulnerabilities, and consistently enforce security standards.

The management and monitoring of security regulations and incidents might be made easier by improving the user interface, which could be made more intuitive and user-friendly. 

For businesses with varied IT ecosystems, increasing the integration capabilities with additional third-party products and services would also increase flexibility and user-friendliness. 

To further reduce the amount of manual work required by security teams, the future release could benefit from more sophisticated automation capabilities, such as automated incident response and remediation workflows. 

In order to facilitate better decision-making and strategic planning, improved analytics and reporting capabilities would also be beneficial. These would provide deeper insights into security occurrences and patterns.

I've used the solution for two years. 

I'd rate stability nine out of ten.

I'd rate scalability nine out of ten.

Technical support has to be improved.

Neutral

We have not used a different solution previously.

The initial setup is complex.

We implemented it through the vendor. I'd rate the services eight out of ten.

Our inhouse IT department's workload has reduced considerably since using the product. 

Setup cost and licensing are quite expensive. 

We did not evaluate other solutions. 

For two years the product has done its job perfectly. 

We use CloudGuard CNAPP for accessing the security status of our assets, managing inventory, and overseeing configuration settings.

It assists our visibility team in monitoring configurations, enabling us to proactively address issues before they arise.

I find the product to have strong detection capabilities. It is adept at generating the desired reports, provided you are familiar with its functionality.

It offers a range of features tailored to address the unique security challenges.

Having additional documentation on how to use CloudGuard CNAPP would be advantageous, especially if it were made more user-friendly. The application's structure seems to lead users down one path, then into another, making it difficult to backtrack or navigate seamlessly between different components. Streamlining the user interface would greatly improve the user experience.

We have been using it for three years.

It is proven to be stable.

It provides good scalability.

There is room for improvement in technical support. I would rate it five out of ten.

Neutral

Setting up CloudGuard CNAPP is straightforward, as it is API-driven. Just a few quick steps, like providing credentials and configuring settings, and you're ready to go.

The ROI of CloudGuard CNAPP is intangible since it primarily involves cost avoidance rather than direct cost reduction or profit generation. It doesn't directly contribute to revenue generation.

When we were comparing Prisma or Pallos, we found that CloudGuard CNAPP offered a more comprehensive range of tools and configuration management settings. It appeared to be a more mature product with a broader scope of capabilities.

My advice to anyone thinking about implementing it is to consider investing in professional services to handle the setup, as they possess a deeper understanding of the platform. Overall, I would rate it seven out of ten.

CloudGuard constantly monitors cloud systems for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit. Many processes associated with cloud security management, such as asset detection, risk assessment, and remediation, are automated by CloudGuard. This allows security teams to concentrate on more strategic efforts. CloudGuard is intended to assist organizations in securing their cloud environments by continuously monitoring and analyzing cloud setups for misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance violations.

Many of the duties associated with maintaining cloud security are automated by CloudGuard, including asset detection, risk assessment, and remediation. 

In addition to improving compliance, this frees up security personnel to concentrate on more strategic initiatives and enables organizations to adhere to industry standards and laws like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR. 

It offers security advice and insights to assist organizations in acting quickly to address concerns. It also has automated remediation capabilities to address found problems and automatically enact security policies.

The asset detection, risk assessment, and remediation processes are only a few of the duties that CloudGuard automates while managing cloud security. This improves compliance, enables organizations to adhere to industry standards and laws like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR, and frees up security personnel to concentrate on more strategic objectives. 

It offers security insights and recommendations to assist organizations in acting and remediating issues swiftly. It also has automated remediation capabilities to address found issues and automatically enforce security policies.

Compliance checks on cloud resources against various industry standards and compliance framework templates need to be improved, to ensure that organizations meet regulatory requirements with clear visibility action controls. This can make it difficult to create and manage custom security policies. 

Cloud security posture management is a proprietary solution, which means that there is no open-source community to support it. This can make it difficult to get help with troubleshooting and other issues.

We have been adopting the solution for more than a year.

CloudGuard is known for being highly scalable and reliable. It handles big cloud workloads with ease and may be implemented in complex cloud infrastructures.

In terms of cloud solutions, the scalability was a fairly simple and entirely software-driven approach.

The customer support is good and offers regularly updated new features and security patches. This ensures that CloudGuard is always protected against the most advanced threats.

Positive

We adopted our cloud journey last year, and while developing the cloud, we took all security precautions. CSPM was a priority solution, and we have apt.

We implemented CSPM in 30 days. Since the solution was simple to implement and the transition was painless, we added many of our cloud environments.

We implemented the solution through a partner.

CloudGuard's return on investment (ROI) varies based on the organization and its cloud environment.

CSPM is an invaluable resource for any organization that makes use of cloud computing. It can assist organizations in improving their cloud security posture, reducing the risk of cyberattacks, and adhering to industry norms and regulations.

We evolved various CSPM tools such as PAN, TRELIX, and Fortinet, however, our management opted to install CloudGuard as a strategic step.

CloudGuard provides a comprehensive set of security solutions for cloud environments.

We have a hybrid environment so we use Check Point Cloud Guard to protect the cloud workload. On-prem, we are already using the Check Point Firewalls so we can manage both environment firewalls using the same management server, AKA the smart console, which saves time and effort to look for logs during any type of troubleshooting. It helps us avoid creating the same objects for each firewall but also provides a single pane of glass through which we can see all gateways, logs, policies, objects, user management, and traffic tracing. 

It is a next-generation firewall that helps a lot in many ways to protect my workloads from threats, such as: 

- firewall blade providing protection at Layer 3 and 4

- application filtering blade providing protection from unauthorized applications or services

- URL filtering providing protection on malicious URLs based on various categories as updated by Check Point on a daily basis

- threat prevention and sandboxing capability to actually help with unknown or zero-day threats (it tests, removes the malicious content, and then releases or blocks by itself)

Overall, it provides good security.

The threat extraction and emulation module is a savior for us from unknown threats. We know that daily millions of new threats emerge over the internet so we like that it provides protection from them all. It's good to have a sandboxing environment that can first assess the threat before releasing it to the production environment. These threats are called zero-day threats for which there is no signature or update available whether it be on an endpoint, machine, antivirus solution, or other software. Therefore, it becomes very useful to use this feature to stop threats from spreading right at the gateway itself.

Their service needs improvement. Their vendor doesn't provide good support. Also, there is no way to escalate it to Check Point so that Check Point can take action against their partner. I don't have direct support with Check Point. We have collaborative support with one of the Check Point partners who do not provide good support. When we reached out to Check Point to escalate; they denied taking any action against the vendor.

I've used the solution for five years.

We use CloudGuard to monitor the cloud IaaS, AWS, and Azure security postures, including cloud assets' configurations. Based on the framework in the rulesets, it will give us failing, passing, or partially compliant scores. It allows us to implement auto-remediation and guardrails. 

If a user exposes storage on the public internet accidentally or purposefully, a daily report is sent to the account owner. CloudGuard will automatically fix the issue if auto-remediation is appropriate. We have GCP, AWS, and Azure accounts. CloudGuard is a SaaS solution, and we onboard all our AWS accounts, whether public, private, or hybrid.

In our sandbox environment, auto-remediation kicks in, and everything is fixed. Users try to do it themselves but often don't know how because they're not trained to provide cloud support. We don't currently use complete remediation, which will break their production environment, but we're getting better by nagging the cloud account users. Our cybersecurity team can use the shared response score to encourage cloud account owners to fix the problem.

CloudGuard has specific instructions for how users should fix issues, but it's like pulling teeth sometimes. Users often don't respond, and we get to the point where we need to tell them that it's going through change management and we can't renew it. We will auto-remediate in production environments if they don't respond by that date. 

It helped some cloud deployment users understand how to improve security posture, but not all of them. It depends on whether they are reading the CloudGuard reports daily. Many don't want to manage that part, and we believe our cybersecurity will help fix that for them.

We automated account onboarding. When a user wants a new cloud account, the automation scripts kick in after the request is approved to create the cloud account. After the provisioning is completed, the account is onboarded into CloudGuard. It enables us to have full coverage because CloudGuard monitors all our organization's cloud accounts.

I wouldn't say that CloudGuard has freed up staff for other projects. I have two or three dedicated SecOps people to monitor and follow up with remediation when auto-remediation isn't possible. We also deal with CloudGuard account requests and just-in-time user account access. It's difficult to assign a specific user to view the cloud accounts only they can see. 

I'm an SME for the product and train people annually because SecOps folks come and go. So far, we have had this software for three years. A lot of other organizations will switch solutions after two or three years. Training is essential because it's a high learning curve for people unfamiliar with the cloud. I don't think CloudGuard has made it more accessible. While it has decreased the resources, we still need at least one full-time admin dealing with CloudGuard, especially with the bugs.

We saved some time. We always go for a Unified Enterprise Platform. In terms of Cloud Security Posture Management, we wanted an enterprise solution with GCP, AWS, and Azure support, so we chose CloudGuard.

The posture management and remediation features are the most valuable. We use GSL Builder to build custom rules in alignment with our organization's policies. CloudGuard has canned rules using multiple standard frameworks, but we also have additional rules. Building custom rules with GSL Builder is medium difficulty. They have several examples of other compliance rules you can use. The GSL documentation is decent. A non-technical person can learn to use GSL Builder in about a week. GSL Builder saved us time and reduced human error. 

The auto-remediation works when it works. It does its job and is based on the rule instead of the alert's severity. In our company, we say, "Okay, this rule is a high severity. We don't want the data to be exposed on the internet." For example, if someone puts a public IP on our database, we will set a rule to shut it down immediately. That's how we define remediation. 

It isn't based on the severity or the level of work. Some rules may be defined as lower severity by default, but they might be higher depending on the organization's policy. It kicks in when there's an alert matching the remediation rule. The effectiveness of the remediation is 50%. Some of their bots used to fix issues automatically need to be updated. We had to make a few custom changes to some bots because they don't wake up.

CloudGuard's effective risk management only scans accounts every hour. We have more than 150 AWS accounts and 20 Azure accounts. We sent Check Point a request asking them to increase the frequency to five to fifteen minutes. I want the flexibility to scan it as often as possible based on the account's importance. That part is lacking. 

When rules change, it messes up the remediation. They haven't found a fix for that yet. The remediation rule goes into limbo. It's an architectural design flaw within their end compliance engine—a serious bug. We must spend extra time reapplying the rule when they periodically update the compliance presets. Auto-remediation breaks if you're using that particular out-of-the-box rule. I haven't experienced this recently, so maybe they fixed that part. However, that's what it did in the past.

Check Point is slow to respond to bugs. They resolve bugs maybe once every two weeks, and their R&D is slow. They're in Israel, and it's not just the Israeli holidays. I would probably pick a large US company if we did this over again. 

They don't give us continuous feedback. I want live feedback when they change something. Stop breaking things. The company should let us know what they're doing when they add new features. They don't have an official beta program, so you can't test the new features. 

That's the other bad thing about this product, but I don't know about other Check Point products. They're a firewall company but not a software company. If you put out a beta, customers should have the option to test it and give feedback. I've been putting a lot of work into CloudGuard to fix all the bugs. They should have paid me to fix their bugs for them.

They need to decrease their bug resolution time. Anything longer than two weeks is problematic. It's why we don't jump into the deep end with all these other features they've added. Our primary feature is the CSPM cloud part. The solution is useless if the reporting or remediation breaks, as it has in the past. It requires an SME for CloudGuard to dig in deeper, which takes time away from our SecOps folks.

We've been using CloudGuard for three years.

CloudGuard is pretty stable.

CloudGuard is scalable. I don't need to worry about it.

I rate Check Point's support a seven out of ten. They respond within a day. 

Neutral

Setting up CloudGuard is straightforward, and it takes a few days. We handled the deployment in-house with two full-time employees. It's a SaaS solution, so the only maintenance required is backups. 

We implemented this solution in-house.

The pricing of CloudGuard increases annually, and we don't see the value because we don't use all the features. We're primarily using CSPM and maybe Workload Protection. We did the Kubernetes part and used Network Explorer as a one-off. We only used Network Explorer for diagnostics. 

We use the Intelligence module for CSPM but don't analyze network traffic with CloudGuard. It's an expensive subscription, so we don't use the intelligence part.

We evaluated Palo Alto Prisma Cloud and Twistlock. Back then, the solution was owned by an independent company called Dome9, and Check Point acquired them. It had the best rule set out there. We chose it because it had all the rule sets out of the box and supported GCP, Azure, and AWS. 

I rate Check Point CloudGard Posture Management a seven out of ten. CloudGuard does its job, but the remediation is not perfect. Other CSPM tools do a better job of using remediation exclusion rules, especially scanning and putting out reports at a custom frequency versus every hour.

If the price isn't an issue and you don't care about using all the features, it's an okay product for enterprises to use to cover all cloud IaaS. If you're thinking about implementing CloudGuard, you should consider two things. First, the price is marked up every year by 10-plus percent, whether you use a particular feature or not. It's an annual subscription model, so you can always cancel at any time. 

Second, you should think about the modules. Workload Protection is okay if you use Kubernetes. You can use intelligence if you need to analyze traffic within your cloud environment for regulation-specific reasons, but it will cost you extra. CloudGuard's strong suit is that they support a lot of the features and AWS cloud assets.

We have used CNAPP on our OpenShift test cluster but are planning to deploy it in our production clusters. We used CNAPP to enhance the visibility of our cloud-deployed applications. It offers various modules to do so. For example, the Posture Management module shows you exposed secrets and security misconfigurations and also gives you hints and ready-to-use JSON configuration files to fix them. 

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) gives you visibility and management automation of identities, roles, entitlements, and privileges in your cloud environments. This helps you find and fix identity- and role-related security holes by constructing a complex privileges graph, which shows you granted permissions and enforced ones, suggesting you enforce the stricter and more secure enforced ones over the ones you granted.

The various CNAPP modules have granted more visibility of our cloud applications to our system engineers and developers. Doing so helps our transition to the cloud by making the management and administrative tasks of our cloud and system engineers easier, as well as suggesting and helping to prioritize patching and updating.

The most valuable features include the Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) module, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), and Cloud Workload Protection (CWP).

The costs are really high if you want the entire capabilities of the platform. However, it is really motivated by the great value of the product. Moreover, you can buy individual licenses for the different modules if you don't need some of them.

I've used the solution for one year.