Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP Reviews

It helped us a lot in improving the regulations and security of our cloud environments.

We still manage an on-premise environment, however, many companies at the beginning believe that the cloud is invulnerable or that the manufacturer must ensure everything, which is not correct. With this implementation, it is possible to improve all current cloud security.

In the company I work for, it was implemented to be able to have governance in addition to good practices in our Microsoft Azure environment. It's a somewhat expensive tool, however, it is worth it to be able to solve all those improvements and avoid so many modern vulnerabilities, which have their point in cloud attacks.

As in our company we have environments that are hybrid in some cases and others totally cloud. We find in Check Point a reliable tool to improve security, implement regulations, and generate governance in cloud environments. In our case, we have a Microsoft Azure public cloud with enough resources which we need to protect. We achieved it together with  Check Point.

It was possible to provide greater security to identities with admin access to the cloud - a critical part of IT management.

The most striking features are:

1- Identity protection generated through Check Point posture management, which is helping to prevent user theft or unauthorized access.

2- The governance that can be provided with this tool is very good since we have been able to implement good practices to avoid vulnerabilities.

3- The administration portal panel is very intuitive. It also generates scores based on regulations and good practices to go little by little with the recommendations, significantly improving security.

Some general improvement characteristics can be made, including the following:

1- Cost improvement. Some tools are quite expensive, and some non-equal manufacturers offer more comfortable capabilities at the cost level.

2- The guidelines to implement or to link with the clouds are not complete. Following them sometimes the task of implementing under the best practices of the manufacturer is not achieved.

3- Many Check Point guides are only available to partners and not to the general public. They can make a better impression by having them public and thereby helping the client.

It's an excellent tool and is available in the Infinity Check Point Portal. Its main function is to centralize governance in the same administration portal and has been tested for more than a year to validate our cloud security.

Previously we used only Microsoft with Defender for Cloud. However, we wanted to have our security centralized. Check Point through the infinity portal achieves that feature.

It's very important to have a reliable and good partner. The proactivity helps us to see the existing needs and check with Check Point what characteristics are required.

We chose Check Point as it provides integrated and centralized security, improving the effectiveness of security reviews.

Even though the cost is somewhat expensive. I recommend this solution for users who use the public cloud.

We wanted to have a centralized and modern security environment, and it was possible to obtain it through Check Point Infinity.

It was possible to implement Check Point CloudGuard to take advantage of cloud intelligence to analyze modern threats. The global learning that Check Point obtains from all its devices for the improvement and confidence of security.

We currently use Microsoft Azure, which has several security features, all with costs, to perform governance, control, vulnerability improvements and regulatory compliance. However, we manage Check Point.

Forensics as your monitoring portal is exceptional.

The features included in Check Point CloudGuard help us a lot with the security of our Microsoft Azure cloud, which we successfully integrate with Check Point CloudGuard.

We have validated the score generated to improve security performance, thereby making improvements to avoid vulnerabilities.

The threat attack is reviewed and covered in an automated manner through cloud intelligence. Its alerts have kept us notified so that we can make the necessary adjustments. It offers incredible performance.

The most important characteristics are the following:

1- The detection of vulnerabilities in real-time. Its monitoring and alerts are triggered by a failure or non-compliance with policies. It helps us to be able to act effectively and quickly.

2- The use of Check Point ThreatCloud allows sharing of information between other Check Point devices to improve trust and form of protection against new threats.

3- Finally, its security application portals are very intuitive. It has helped us with the simple handling of Check Point CloudGuard.

Some possibilities of improvements for Check Point include:

1- Improving or creating best practices that can be generated publicly so that customers can have a package of policies, for example, that the manufacturer provides in addition to easy access to this material.

2- Improvement at the support level for management, handling and solution of cases in a better, faster, and more effective way. Sometimes the cases take a long time to be able to schedule a session and solve together with the client and support.

3- The costs are high. They could provide better costs for the client to make a simpler decision and not be affected by this issue.

One of its characteristics is cloud intelligence. It was adapted to our centralization and public cloud requirements.

Our company already uses several centralized products in the Check Point Infinity platform. For more than six months, we have used CloudGuard.

We used Azure Defender for the cloud. It is good, however, I liked more the form and the trust of Check Point.

It is always important to have access to a partner to help you with costs, and requirements and to help you choose the best option within Check Point.

We previously validated some solutions. However, the features of Check Point CloudGuard were better suited to our requirements.

It is an expensive solution. However, I recommend it.

We need more infrastructure in the cloud to avoid vulnerabilities.                        

With this shield infrastructure, we seek to protect, improve, and close security problems that generally arise in the implementation of code, apps, and APIs that maintain privileged keys or identities, for which we have achieved increased security with best practices.

This tool really gave us development implementation security. Many times the applications were built with a user or identity with privileges to be able to manage within their infrastructure. However, it is not the best way to deal with this challenge. APIs were also exposed that were connected to the infrastructure that could be violated. Thanks to Check Point, we have been able to improve with best practices and protect the information and code of our infrastructure.

This Check Point security tool has many benefits. Some of the ones that we liked the most include:

1 - How Check Point CloudGuard centralizes the protection of the workload. In the Infinity Portal all the administration can be managed easily. We can monitor and scan the codes and make decisions to improve security.

2 - This tool is very cloud-based. In addition, it can handle hybrid environments, which is a great feature for clients with mixed environments.

3 - The automatic learning and an AI engine help to find more modern vulnerability problems. With this, it provides greater security to the client.

Some improvements that can be made to Check Point CloudGuard are the following:

1. Cost improvement. Currently, this solution is somewhat expensive. We have not really seen a solution with these characteristics and so complete. However, the cost is high.

2. There is very little Check Point documentation as it is a very new tool. Sometimes we followed the documentation, yet it was not possible to implement it in the tool, for which we had to verify with the executive of our partner to request help.

3. Support is very slow.

This tool has been used this year by development partners and managed by support. It is a great tool that is coupled with new technologies that cloud development has produced, and thus we've been able to adjust and provide the required security.

This tool and Spectral are some of the best tools we've tried. Using both is excellent.

Prepare to pay, since the tool is expensive. However, I recommend talking to a Check Point partner so that they can provide you with everything related to the tool along with costs.

This tool is centralized with the Infinity Check Point Portal. This, with the other Check Point tools that we handle, is excellent for administration.

We validated this along with some other tools. We did not have the same confidence that Check Point provided due to its prestige, its characteristics, and its comments.

Evaluate this tool and also check the new Spectral Check Point tool, which can help complement this.

Both are recommended.

This product detects cloud anomalies and immediately quarantines threats to minimize further data damage. 

It enables our team to have full visibility of the security situation surrounding our hosted applications and workloads. Check Point CloudGuard Intelligence has a comprehensive risk assessment system that provides an advanced report on any business engagements. 

The product provides detection and security analysis recommendations that can safeguard cloud infrastructure in case of ransomware attacks. It monitors data flow closely to ascertain and block insecure content.

This platform has improved the cloud security situation in the organization. It provides reliable information that can be used for advanced planning and efficient decision-making. 

The cost of maintaining secure cloud infrastructure has been reduced due to regulated pricing from Check Point CloudGuard Intelligence team. The unified cloud infrastructure monitoring system can monitor data centers with limited resources. 

It provides critical insights that enable the IT team to plan and launch smart investigations when there are security breaches.

Comprehensive data visualization helps each team to track data and identify threats that can affect the entire workflow. 

Integration with third parties has been successful, and this has saved us costs and time for problem-solving. 

Anomaly detection is highly efficient and more productive with excellent threat prevention tools. 

The customer support staff responds quickly and positively when reached to address any issue affecting operations. 

The UI is user-friendly, and new users can easily learn how it works.

Effects on the network can slow down performance and lead to data leakages that can expose confidential information to cyber attacks. 

The UI can be upgraded to be more presentable and solve most challenges that affect users when there are inefficiencies. 

It does not support on-premise deployments such as VMware Tanzu, and this has been a major drawback when it comes to integrations with some applications. 

The majority of the features have been performing efficiently, and we are happy. The development can keep on updating the platform to meet daily changes and organizational demands.

I've used the solution for nine months.

The performance has been stable.

The scalability has been smart, and I am really impressed.

Customer support services are efficient.

Positive

This is the most effective platform I have worked with.

The setup was straightforward.

We implemented it through the vendor team.

There has been increased ROI since we deployed this platform.

The cost and setup are relatively good for most enterprises.

The other options are not as powerful as this solution.

Check Point CloudGuard Intelligence offers excellent cloud network security.

We wanted to protect, analyze, and detect issues within the infrastructure that we have taken to the cloud. We were looking for ways that we can analyze and introduce a more complete internal forensic analysis so that if an intrusion did not happen, we could have a visualization in which we could be constantly learning how to detect and ee anomalies and provide analysis for detection in real-time. 

We needed a solution that could handle analysis and offer automated detection with process intelligence. We were interested in threat prevention in real-time to help us detect anomalies, attempts, and atypical actions in any of the activities of the teams or users. The goal was to take advantage of that learning and detection. Machine learning supervises and analyzes in an advanced way everything that is happening in the cloud. It works within any type of cloud and can be integrated more so if we want to migrate or scale tomorrow, we can carry out this detection automatically.

The solution learns day by day. It learns from behavior, attacks, management, detections, captures packets, real-time analysis, et cetera. It's generating knowledge from a variety of sources for an excellent analysis. 

This allows us to move faster and have more efficient responses to incidents. It provides alerts for all these types of activities, achieving more objective management for packet capture and a combination of activities within the cloud environment.

I'd like to see more advanced encryption for local features, which is not present right now. We'd like to have more defined control when implementing intelligent analysis on the cloud. We'd like to extend analysis not just to crowds but to local teams for more granular analysis and advanced searchability.

I've used the solution for about a year and a bit.

We needed to establish a security posture under certain requirements. We needed to protect infrastructure as a service and our software as a service platform in each of our environments for the development and implementation of the cloud. 

We needed to provision instantaneous computing infrastructure and administration through the Internet. Management and security was the initial requirement, with more requirements being established. We were seeking a baseline that was provided to us by a security expert that would allow us to identify and remediate security risks and evaluate monitoring automation. We needed a solution that could prevent the company from being violated when implementing and managing a new configuration.

The solution give us compliance and offered continuous evaluation of the policies that were established. We managed to automatically generate tools for the detection and resolution of compliance and managed to establish supervision of the operations, including the management of each incident which involves identifying risks and qualifying in order to be able to share any news or updates. This allowed us to be more proactive, complete, and precise. 

The product allows us to enhance the security of the implementations we have. It has helped resolve several security incidents that we previously had, and we could not see since previously we did not have a solution that allowed us to quickly and safely manage each one of the activities. With Check Point, we can now map incidents and see how the security teams work to verify the integrity of the systems.  

When it comes to validating the power, security, implementation, and management, I would like to also have the capacity more easily on-premise as well as the cloud. Some problems have been found in analysis at the time of execution, and local install revision agents have generated management incompatibility. It is important to evaluate the applications that are on-site since they are needed in the organization. We're looking for a solution that can incorporate legacy infrastructure for some of our business needs.

I've used the solution for approximately nine months.

Check Point CloudGuard Intelligence surveys the company's multi-cloud servers to ensure they are free from threats. 

The software provides real-time data analytics on the performance and security situation around the applications. Data visualization enables the company IT team to easily monitor the networking system and notice any abnormality. 

The intelligence provision on workflow infrastructure enables my team to prepare for risks and put measures for curbing malware attacks. The system has provided CloudBots that detect any threats and misconfigurations automatically from our cloud servers.

The platform has enabled the company to avoid unnecessary data threats affecting the workflow chain and slowing down performance. 

Intelligence information with real-time data has enabled all the teams to plan effectively and make informed decisions. 

It is highly flexible since it can operate on both mobile and desktop devices. It allows each department to access and control operations and deploy security measures based on the demands. 

Cloud security monitoring has enhanced the safety of workloads and created a clean infrastructure for transferring data to our cloud stores and on-premises.

Typically, the threat-hunting mission scales down the performance of the entire network traffic flow to establish any drawback. Cloud threat intelligence detects any form of violation that goes beyond our policies for immediate rectification. The system has deployed security tools to enhance effective investigations in the entire company networking system. The out-of-the-box integrations enable us to integrate security technologies and create robust security management systems. The set features have a great impact on the overall performance of the company programs, and we are grateful for this great solution. 

The software configurations theory is complicated, and without proper planning and a well-skilled technical team, it cannot perform its tasks properly. Without effective mapping of critical areas, the platform cannot provide very good results. 

The maintenance cost is high after deployment, and it requires close monitoring for effective results. 

This version performs effectively when it is channeled to the right network infrastructure. It has created a centralized operation system that can comprehensively monitor and manage security for all connecting systems.

I've used the solution for one year.

It is stable and has created a better work environment.

Providing security for a multi-cloud networking system has been awesome.

The customer service team has been providing reliable support at all times, and I thank them for such contribution.

Positive

I have no experience from similar solution in my career experience.

The setup was complex, however, the vendor's technical team provided effective guidance.

We deployed it through a vendor team, and they were knowledgeable in all aspects.

The recorded ROI has been growing on a daily basis based on an excellent performance.

The setup cost is high.

I did not check other products.

In recent years, in search of a new strategy, we have tried to strengthen our security and infrastructure posture, being one of the fundamental pillars of a large organization. 

As a result of this situation, we have begun to adapt using solutions that support us at the cloud and on-premise. Posture Management is the solution that supports us in this search for a healthy, strong infrastructure and, above all, is aligned with the legal and regulatory frameworks at an international level.

This tool is very integrated for emerging infrastructures such as the cloud. It comes to support us with this new legal framework. Ideas, opinions, and regulations serve as a baseline to protect us from new methods or attacks. Without this legal framework, it would become more difficult, as many organizations are new to the use of the cloud. This solution gives us support from the experts who have been first in this model of infrastructure and services. We can ensure that by following and adapting our needs based on these guidelines we will be a great organization with a strong vision and a great security framework established to protect us. 

We like the ability to investigate, analyze, and generate reports.

Its most notable feature is to extend the analytics it performs to teams in any available cloud. 

We can collect analysis and be able to transform in such a way that the data provided allows us to find great value in institutional security. We can support each other to be better and more efficient daily. 

Currently, I would like this solution extended to cellular devices or tablets. This will be able to allow us to be more efficient.

I've used the solution for one year.

CloudGuard is a SaaS security solution that handles compliance and security for cloud.

There are two major functions, and the first is to operate as a central firewall monitoring and management system in the cloud. We have more than 100 firewalls in the cloud, and CloudGuard allows us to manage them.

The second function is its role as a compliance suite that helps you in keeping your cloud platforms compliant with PCI or ISO 27001.

For the most part, this is what I used it for. In the beginning, CloudGuard did not have many features. There were only these two.

Using CloudGuard, I was able to manage a multi-cloud platform based on AWS, Azure, and Google for a multinational company in Europe with only three engineers.

CloudGuard enables customizable governance using simple, readable language. The biggest advantage is that when there are things to be changed because of compliance problems, the engineers receive a plain-language text that instructs them on what to do. This also means that you don't have to have as many cloud specialists available.

The two most valuable features for us are the central firewall administrator and the real-time cloud compliance monitoring. The vendor has been building on these features, but they are the two that are most important for us.

With respect to how the compliance frameworks affect our security and compliance operations, it is important to consider that first of all, in the cloud, anybody can change a firewall. We wanted to have a central firewall administrator, with our more than 100 firewalls, so that we could make sure that our platform would stay secure. CloudGuard alerts if somebody replaces something and puts it back, which is the biggest feature that we wanted.

Then, as an added feature, they have a real-time audit platform where you constantly have audits of your clouds to see that engineers don't forget to put all of the compliance in place.

CloudGuard's accuracy when it comes to compliance checking is very good, and it is done in real-time. I would rate it a nine out of ten. It is not perfect because sometimes you have false positives, although I don't think that you can get rid of them entirely. Overall, for compliance and diverse compliance methodologies, I would rate it a nine.

On the topic of accuracy, I would rate remediation a nine out of ten as well. It is easy to do because it is written in plain language, and also because there is a manual on how to remediate.

The false positives can be annoying at times.

We have been using CloudGuardfor five years.

My experience with CloudGuard began about five and a half years ago when I was working with a company that was building a multi-cloud platform. I was one of the first customers for CloudGuard, before the Check Point acquisition, and I was using it to manage my multi-cloud platform.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. It has always worked and I've never had a bad thing happen with it. In the beginning, when they introduced new features during beta testing, there were issues. However, it was always stable.

CloudGuard is a SaaS solution, so it scales with your cloud. When you get hundreds of firewalls, perhaps 200 or 300 of one, then the complexity becomes the same in CloudGuard as the thing that you want to solve in the cloud, so I don't think that they can extend to that.

I have a deployment that is European-wide, multi-cloud, with approximately 480 virtual machines. There were a lot of other components as well, so it was a really huge use case.

The technical support from CloudGuard is really good. In fact, for me at the time, it was really good because I had direct access to the American team, so I just had to call if there was an issue. I also had monthly meetings with them to discuss things to improve and see if their service was okay for us.

Positive

Initially, we used another solution but that was not for firewall security. Rather, it was for compliance.

The initial setup is really easy. Just submit the cloud key. It takes between an hour and two hours to deploy. When I installed it, the process did not take longer than an hour.

My implementation strategy fits into the way I design secure private clouds or multi-clouds, based on public cloud providers. It's almost a necessity. You can do it in other ways by using the local ACLs, etc, but then it becomes cumbersome. CloudGuard takes a lot of the work out of it and gives you a single point to manage all of your security firewalls.

I deployed CloudGuard myself. In my previous role, I was the head of cloud development and I directed two out of the three engineers in the team.

In the beginning, the price of CloudGuard was cheap, whereas now it is not.

I haven't gotten the latest pricing, but my advice is that you need to balance it out with your cloud business cases. It all depends on how many machines, servers, and the size of the cloud that you have. It's probably not useful if you have only a few machines and some network security groups to manage them. In this case, it's not something that you need.

I did evaluate another tool initially. I cannot recall the name but it had ".io" after it. Ultimately, we decided not to use it because it only had the compliance component and it was more expensive.

The native cloud security controls provided by the cloud vendors, when it comes to features like transparency and customization, are very weak. That's why you need CloudGuard. On their own, I would rate the native cloud security controls a four out of ten. They are complex, and the biggest issue is that it's difficult to secure if you want to centralize your security operation.

When maintaining and scaling security services and configurations across multiple public clouds using CloudGuard, versus using native cloud security controls, I find that it is much better. It's the same interface in CloudGuard, regardless of the cloud. Of course, your firewall administrator still needs to have knowledge of what he's doing. That doesn't change. The important point is that the interface is much better and it doesn't change between cloud environments.

I would rate the accuracy of the security visibility slightly lower than nine out of ten because it's still complex to do, even with CloudGuard. The biggest feature of CloudGuard is that it rolls back the changes when somebody has changed it in the cloud without authorization, yet the complexity of managing a lot of firewalls is still there. I would rate the accuracy of security visibility a seven and a half or eight out of ten.

I would rate the solution's comprehensiveness for cloud compliance and governance an eight out of ten. The false positives are a little bit annoying at times.

CloudGuard helps to minimize the attack surface and manage dynamic access, although I didn't use the dynamic access in my setup. For my use case, it was primarily minimizing the internal attack surface because I didn't use it for external connections. I had a different role there. When you only have three engineers, you need to trust them. The reason that we used CloudGuard was to be able to do it with a few engineers.

CloudGuard provides a unified security solution across AWS, Azure, and Google, but not for anything else. To that end, I don't think that any other cloud provider would be a market contender at this point, and Google will probably even disappear after a while.

My advice for anybody who is considering CloudGuard is to try it. If you're looking to manage a large security defense platform, in-depth, with a lot of firewalls, try it and you'll be surprised.

One of the things that I learned from using CloudGuard was that it offered support for compliance. I was originally just looking for a way to manage all of these firewalls, and that came as a pleasant surprise. It helped us a lot with our ISO 27000 and PCI certification.

Overall, in terms of functionality, CloudGuard is fairly well made.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Primarily, we use this solution to detect security configurations in AWS environments.

The reporting is quite good. It is the most powerful aspect of this solution.

It's user-friendly.

In general, we abandoned this solution this year.

Each component of this solution, in my opinion, could be improved.

Integration with ticketing systems, as well as the most important noise and completeness over findings, are definitely in need of improvement. They didn't take into account some additional context.

The UI is very slow.

There is room for improvement. Consider the entire context of the findings and try to avoid making a comparison between the rule and the entity's state. In general, for the product to be successful, they need to improve security, and configuration detection.

I have been working with Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management for two years.

It generates a large number of false positives.

We haven't attempted to scale the product because there are no additional plug-ins or add-ons.

We have contacted technical support but were not satisfied. Technical support needs improvement.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis.

From a pricing perspective, they are pretty expensive. You can find better offerings on the market.

I would not recommend this solution to other users.

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