Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP Reviews

1. Visibility for cloud workloads, including server, serverless and Kubernetes.
2. Security configuration review along with automatic remediation.
3. Posture management and compliance for a complete cloud environment.
4. Centralize visibility for a complete cloud environment of the workload hosted on multiple cloud platforms (AWS and Azure).
5. Baseline for security policy as per the workload based on services, such as S3, EC2, etc.
6. Visibility of an API call within the environment.
7. IAM management providing access to the cloud network in a controlled manner.
8. Alerts and notifications for any security breach/changes in the cloud environment.
9. Flow visibility of traffic to and from the cloud environment.
10. Real-time alerting for any security incidents.

They provide support for Azure, Amazon, GCP, and Alibaba. However, we just have AWS and Azure.

1. Provides complete visibility of the workload hosted on different cloud platforms (AWS and Azure) along with multiple tenants. 
2. Helps in enhancing security for cloud environments by providing reports, both in terms of security and compliance. 
3. Provides complete visibility of traffic flowing to/from the cloud platform.
4. Provides best practice policy that helps to strengthen the security of the workload.
5. Assets inventory and API calls can happen from the cloud.
6. Provides control in terms of accessing the cloud workload. As a policy is created, this will block direct access to the cloud environment in case the same is not define or approved in Dome9.

Security visibility with Dome9 is excellent. Normally, without this type of solution, especially if you have some workloads hosted on Azure, they give you minimal tools to be able to analyze the loss. There are different consoles that need to be checked for analyzing any incident. In the case of Dome9, it gives you the loss provided in a report on a centralized console. It gives you complete visibility, including the IP to IP Flow, which is happening from the workloads to the Internet or the Internet to the workloads. Even in case of getting a threat intelligence from Check Point, which we have the integration, if some workflows are communicating any suspicious IPs, then the reports are available on the flow logs. On top of that, it also provides a report where you will be able to find out from which location or country you are getting the traffic to your workloads. Therefore, if you want to block certain geo-locations from communicating with your network, then you can also do that using Dome9.

The workload, which was taking a day's time, now can be turned out within hours. We are able to analyze the logs in real-time. Previously, if we enabled some services, then the email needed to be sent to the security team who would do the scanning, might submit the reports, and post some action to be taken by the developers. Using this solution, we are getting the reports in real-time. The remediation can also be applied automatically. The developer can take the necessary action immediately. It provides us what action needs to be taken.

Unless we did some scanning, we used to not know that there were security flaws within particular services. However, by using Dome9, as it has complete visibility, we are getting those details much faster.

The firewall normally has been managed by security team. Admins can bypass through firewall to create any policy. They can go outside and downloading/uploading anything from their workloads. This solution provides that control as well.

1. The IAM role gives us complete control over the cloud environment. In case someone tries to bypass and create a user or policy locally, which is not allowed or defined in Dome9, changes will be rolled back and a notification will be sent to the concerned team.
2. It's always ON and available on a mobile device using the app.
3. There is complete visibility of the traffic flow with threat intelligence provided from Check Point. It even provides communication detail on any suspicious IPs.
4. Provides detailed information if some workload tries to directly access and bypass any firewall policy.
5. Provides a granular level of reports along with issues based on compliance standards, which are defined depending upon organizational requirements.
6. Task delegation as a particular incident can be assigned to a particular individual. The same can also be done manually or automatically.
7. Customizes queries for detecting any incident.

The solution is pretty straightforward to use, as it is only a SaaS model. You just need to enable the accounts for which Dome9 needs to do validation, and that's it.

Compliance checking capabilities: When you enroll your account, we have multiple accounts. Once you enter that on Dome9, it does a complete scan of your account based on these flow logs. It checks: "What are the security flaws?" So, the compliance depends on the company and what they are using as a benchmark. Normally, for India, we use the CIS as a benchmark, then whatever flow logs are available, those are provided in the reports. Then, we check those compliance reports against the CIS benchmark, and accordingly, take actions. We can then know what are the deviation on the cloud platform and on the account, with respect to the CIS.

There are some use cases where you will not have reports readily available or not get the dashboard for particular outputs. You can create a query on the console for those, e.g., if a particular EXE file started on a workload, we can find out if that is running anywhere in the cloud. While it does not provide details on the process level, it will provide us with which sensor is communicating to which IP addresses as well as if there are any deviations from that pattern.

It has remediation capabilities, and there are two options available:

1. You can do automatic remediation, where you need to define the policy for which unit that you are doing remediation. 
2. It can be assigned to a particular team or group of people for its particular vulnerabilities of security flaws. That ticket can then be raised to service quotas be remediated manually.

1. Policy validation should be available before it is deployed in a production environment using a cloud template.
2. Automatic remediation requires read/write access. When providing read/write access to third-party applications, this can add risk. It should have some options of triggering API calls to the cloud platform, which in turn, can make the required changes.
3. A number of security rules need to be added in order to identify more issues. 
4. The reporting should have more options. The reports should be more granular.
5. It should support all container platforms for visibility of a complete infrastructure single console, such as, PCF.

Three months.

Until now, we have not faced any issues in term of downtime or outages. It seems to be quite stable.

Scalability is not an issue. There are a number of workload licenses that need to be procured, then it is straightforward.

There are between eight to 10 security admins and auditors who have access to Dome9.

Our complete cloud workload is managed through Dome9.

The support is excellent. They regularly review our cloud infrastructure and provide suggestions to help us have a better security posture.

Initially, we were using tools provided by the service provider, such as, ScoutSuite, AWS Config Rules, AWS Trusted Advisor, or Amazon GuardDuty for monitoring, and similar tools for Azure as well. Then, we needed to go through a different console to identify any incidents.

Initially, we used submit a report, but there was no remediation nor information provided how to remediate workload issues. In our current scenarios, we are able to get the complete visibility. The complete visibility of the solution has been a key to the increase in our productivity.

The initial setup was straightforward. The only thing that was required from our side was a cloud template, which was provided by Dome9. We need to executed that template in our cloud environment for AWS and Azure. It automatically creates a read-only ID on the AWS platform for Dome9 to connect with. There is some configuration which needs to be done on Dome9 as well as AWS, but the deployment takes around 15 to 30 minutes.

Check Point's team was available, but we implemented it in-house with our support team.

We don't require staff for deployment and maintenance of this solution.

As it is a security product, the ROI will not have that much importance because it is enhancing your security and/or providing more security to your infrastructure. If there are any security incidents, then Dome9 is able to protect us.

Initially, once the solution was deployed into production, then the scanning used to happen and we used to see the environment's visibility. In the current situation, as everyone is moving to the DevOps environment and using the CI/CD pipelines, it helps us to analyze vulnerabilities way before they get installed in production and the web. It gives us more security in the production environment.

The licensing and costs are straightforward, as they have a baseline of 100 workloads (number of instances) within one license with no additional nor hidden charges. If you want to have 200 workloads under Dome9, then you need to take out two licenses for that. Also, it does not have any impact on cloud billing, as data is shared using the API call. This is well within the limit of free API calls provided by the cloud provider.

We evaluated Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and Trend Micro Cloud One Conformity.

Normally, the policies are accessible only on the browsers, e.g., if you compile them from Prisma Cloud, they're available as a part of a browser. However, for management users, especially for CIOs and CTOs, it becomes difficult for them to type URLs, then login. In the case of Dome9, they provide an app. With that app, you can directly login with single sign-on. It is much easier to access using the app compared to the browser option.

Most things are the same for all three providers. The major difference between Dome9 and Prisma is the IAM roles. The maturity of IAM roles available in Dome9 are much better than the other two solutions. Currently, our focus is mostly on what is happening and who is making the changes in the environment. Another thing is the visibility that Dome9 provides through its intel is better than the other two solutions.

The other two solutions have system capabilities better than Check Point.

I would recommend Prisma as well as Dome9 because they both have the visibility. In our case, the IAM was a critical piece of our requirements.

The cloud and on-prem environments are completely two different networks.

They should offer the cloud in India. Soon, there will be GDPR and India will have its own data protection laws. This might create some issues in the case of the data residing outside India. Because we are collecting metadata from the internal networks for the cloud environment, this is the reason that I suggest that they should have some plans to have the cloud in India. However, neither Prisma nor Trend Micro have cloud in India.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

1) Visibility for Cloud Work Load for Server, Server Less & Container environment 

2) Security configuration review along with auto-remediation

3) Posture management and Compliance for complete Cloud Environment

4) Centralize Visibility for Complete Cloud Environment of Workload hosted on Multiple Cloud Platform (AWS, Azure, and GCP)

5) The baseline for Security Policy as per Workload based on Services such as S3, EC2, etc

6) Visibility of API call within the environment

7) IAM management providing access to cloud network in a control manner

8) Alert and Notification for any Security breach/Changes in Cloud environment

9) Flow Visibility of traffic from and to Cloud Environment

10) Real-time alerting for any incident 

1) Provides visibility of organization complete cloud infra hosted on different cloud platforms such as AWS & Azure. It also provides visibility of different accounts hosted on multiple tenants on a single dashboard.

2) Provide visibility of workload with an average instance running on a daily basis. As we have few instances that are taken offline during nonworking hours

3) It provides access to complete Cloud environment in control manner, Admin is not allowed to create or add any user or change security Policy directly with an admin account, unless the same has been approved via IAM role

4) Provides compliance and vulnerability detail of our environment. It also provides auto-remediation for few policies.

5) It has helped us to create a baseline while enabling any services.

6) Provides complete detail of any workload trying or getting connected to the Internet or if some workload is getting bypass from Firewall Policy.

7) Provides end to end visibility of source and detail IP address along with communication detail.

8) Reports generated based on metadata and API calls hence it does not impact our billing cycle 

1) IAM role is the feature which is widely used as it provides a granular level of control and visibility of any changes happening within our Cloud network

2) Benchmark of our network

3) Complaisance and reporting to understand and mitigate any security issue 

4) Threat intel integration which provides us visibility in case any workload is communicating with Suspicious or blacklisted IP

5) Centralize dashboard for different tenant and account 

6) Assets Management as it provide complete visibility of our workload inkling EC2 instance or Serverless 

1) More number of Security Policy to have more number of detection 

2) It should capture more information in metadata including communication detail. Also, Internal IP addresses should not be tracked as this might be having some compliance issues. 

3) Should have support for VMware Pivotal Cloud Foundry

4) Should maintain  configuration information which will help in case forensic need to be performed in term of changes

5) Should allow Policy to be deployed using a template and the same should be getting reviewed before deployment. This will help us to provide secure deployment CI/CD

We have been using Dome9 for three months.

we have workout for SaaS offering from Dome9 hence entire setup is managed and maintained by Dome9. We have enrolled our account and using it as a service and till not we have not observed any outages 

As it's available as SaaS and subscription offering it can be scalable deepening upon the number of workloads for which support is required.

Overall its excellent both support and presales team.

We used a Cloud-native solution to identify security issues but it did not provide any detailed visibility. Also, multiple console access where required in order to identify and security flaw.

It was straightforward there was template provided by Dome9 (Checkpoint) and that need to be imported in our account which create ID and provide access to Dome9 on our cloud infra to monitor and collect metadata logs

Our cloud team has helped us in terms of implementation. Also, it's not complicated the complete step by step guide is provided by Dome9 (CheckPoint) for enrolling Cloud to Dome9.

Cost is based on number or Workload in case of Prisma & Dome9 

For Aquasec it's based on a number of application workloads

For Conformity it's based on the number of accounts 

Redlock from Prisma 

Conformity from Trend Micro

Auquasec 

Licensing should be based on workload and should have some option for smaller brackets its should not in starting from 100,200 etc.

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP is primarily designed to protect cloud-native applications and their underlying infrastructure from cyber threats. The primary use cases of this solution are comprehensive cloud security, workload protection, cloud security posture management, DevSecOps integration, threat detection and response, compliance and risk management.

Checkpoint CloudGuard Cnapp has improved efficiency, accuracy, cost-effectiveness, data-driven decision making and customer satisfaction.

The valuable features of Checkpoint CloudGuard CNAPP are automation capabilities, integration with existing systems, real-time analytics and reporting, customization and flexibility, security and compliance, scalability and growth support and a user-friendly interface.

Improvements can be made to the user interface, performance and reliability, security and compliance, and customer support.

I've used the solution for the past year.

The stability is good.

The scalability is nice.

Technical support is good.

Positive

No, I did not previously use a different solution. 

The solution was set up via our in-house team.

The ROI is okay.

The pricing and licensing can be improved.

No, I did not evaluate another solution. 

When idle virtual machines hosting Azure Functions require protection and vulnerability scanning, we can leverage the Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP solution to gain a consolidated single pane of glass view and manage these workloads.

By utilizing Check Point CloudGuard for security, our clients can now protect both their cloud assets and on-premise assets. CloudGuard also provides a single pane of glass for multi-cloud management, including protection for their Azure resources.

The new scanning function is a valuable feature that wasn't available until recently. Importantly, it's enabled by default.

Another advantage of CloudGuard CNAPP is that it can be deployed as a SaaS solution on Check Point Standard, eliminating the need for a custom subscription. This flexibility is a significant improvement.

CloudGuard CNAPP could be enhanced by increasing the number of components that run natively on Azure. This would allow Check Point to offer a forward-looking security solution that caters to customers who require a purely Azure-based environment. Currently, the mixed architecture involving on-premises and AWS deployments might not meet all compliance and security needs.

I have been using Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP for one year.

Our clients can measure the return on investment of CloudGuard CNAPP in several ways. Firstly, it offers improved operational metrics compared to traditional methods. This eliminates the need for retraining staff on specific cloud vendors, as CloudGuard CNAPP provides a unified platform. Secondly, the ease of implementation contributes to a faster ROI. By considering factors like implementation speed, ongoing maintenance requirements, and reduced training needs, we can effectively measure the ROI of CloudGuard CNAPP.

We evaluated Azure Functions, but for existing Check Point customers, it might be more advantageous from a security standpoint for their operations team to maintain a single pane of glass for their existing on-premises and other cloud provider investments. This would allow them to adopt a multi-cloud approach.

I would rate Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP ten out of ten. Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP is a great solution.

We use the posture management capabilities of CloudGuard CNAPP and the workload protection capabilities.

We review CloudGuard results and generate tickets to contact the owners.

Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management will improve the organization. Currently, it is operating as a stopgap measure to address these issues. This is because there are a lot of them being generated. They are working on automation to automatically create tickets and track when issues are remediated. So, hopefully, when that comes into play, it will be a much more valuable tool.

The ability to drill down to individual hosts on an account and see which ones are affected is valuable. This is because we have a lot of cases where people remediate part of the solution on half of their hosts, but don't realize that they have more hosts that need to be addressed.

The rules are not well-tuned, and many of them generate false positives or nonsensical results. For example, they might flag port 443 as open, even though it is supposed to be open for a public web server. There needs to be a better way to exclude certain hosts that are compliant and are supposed to be open.

I have been using Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management for three months.

The solution has not crashed yet, and there are a lot of findings, so that is a good sign of its stability.

The solution is able to handle a large number of vulnerabilities, so it seems to be able to scale well.

We've only been using the solution for a few months, but we're already starting to see the numbers go down. This is encouraging, but it's important to be aware of any vulnerabilities that may exist so that we can take steps to address them.

I'm glad I don't have to pay the licensing fee. Everything in this field is very expensive. I don't have a say in the matter.

I give Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management a six out of ten. It could be better once fully tuned and properly deployed.

My usage is rather difficult because the client has not spent much time tuning the solution, as they are planning to automate a lot of it. As a result, I am currently the manual.

The solution actually created more work for the staff because it made them aware of all the vulnerabilities. As a result, their priority is now to fix them, which created a lot of work and a lot of tickets.

I wish I had been involved in the deployment because I would have done it differently.

At the RSA conference, we receive a lot of promotional items.

The RSA conference does not impact our organization's cybersecurity purchases.

We started to use Check Point as a firewall. That's what it was for. Now we use it for all the endpoint security, cloud security, and API endpoint security. That's probably our major use case. 

The solution has improved our organization by allowing us to be more flexible and deploy changes much more quickly. Since it gives us an audit trail, it's much easier for us to track or change things.

The feature that I find most valuable is the blocking feature. When we have to block something, the screens we have in front of us are really good. They are very user-friendly, and the processes are quick. That's something we've really liked from the beginning. 

Especially with cloud security, there's too much clutter on the screen and too many things going on.

In a future release, we'd like to have the ability to see if there is abnormal data being transferred. We'd like to see more features coming through that allow us to act more proactively and act against vulnerabilities effectively.

I've used the solution for a long time. I've been with my company for more than ten years, and over that time, I've been using it. We've been using Check Point from on-premises deployments to the cloud.

We have not witnessed any crashing.

The solution works well for us, both on-premises and on the cloud. 

The support has always been the best.

Positive

We've used the solution for ten years. I'm not sure what we used before. 

I was not a part of the initial setup.

We have seen an ROI in terms of flexibility and ease of use. 

The solution is very easy to use. We've used it for a long time. Our team is very familiar with it. Different people, even with different responsibilities, can share. It has helped us free up staff time. 

I'd rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

We can correlate the information and get analytics that helps us be more proactive in terms of minimizing risk on the cloud.

We can integrate the solution very well with various cloud networks, including AWS, Azure, and Google, which is what we are on. 

We are provided with the right information in order to get analytics that will help us be more proactive and minimize exposure to threats. 

The solution is scalable. 

It is easy to set up. 

The solution needs to improve remediation. We need to reduce risk by remediating gaps in security.

You do need to pay extra in order to get better support.

I started working with the solution five years ago.

The solution is scalable. However, the issue is when you buy the license, you buy the quantity of data to do the intelligence, not to keep the data stored on the cloud. We pay to correlate one terabyte of information for only one month.

We don't open a lot of tickets for support. You do need to pay extra for support. If you pay more, you get faster answers. You get a lot more attention if you pay.

Neutral

The initial setup is very straightforward. I don't have to do any tuning or configuration for it to work. You just need to enable it. 

The pricing is moderate. It's not too expensive or overly cheap. It is comparable to other solutions. 

We're a Check Point partner. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

This solution is part of a robust and great security tool from Check Point, which through its multi-cloud, CloudGuard has this feature to further strengthen this great solution.

In our case, this characteristic helps us to be able to be more prepared in the face of threats. Its artificial intelligence identifies threats and has great machine learning, which further strengthens the tool.

In addition to their forensic analysis in the event of any irregularity, they strengthen and facilitate audits. All of this helps to improve security postures and best practices for the cloud.

CheckPoint CloudGuard, in addition to its intelligence and advanced search for threats, helps us with many forensic analyses in the event of any irregularity. It strengthens and facilitates audits as well. All of this helps to improve security postures and good practices for the cloud, which is important due to possible and future security regulations that we want to adopt.

On the other hand, it facilitates alerts and the monitoring of threats in real-time. Its integration with SIEM tools has given us a greater vision of what is happening in our environment.

The most valuable features include:

I would like them to include support for their products in languages other than English in order to have easier contact with Check Point support. This would make management easier.

The costs of latest cloud solutions are very expensive. Some of them are only for large companies, and they should make cost improvements.

Response times for support or problem cases sometimes take a long time to be addressed.

The documentation can be easier with more public documents and accessibility to the client. Currently, it is difficult to find documentation for new products.

This is an excellent tool and we've used it in the last year within the CloudGuard platform in the Infinity Portal.

For solutions as complete as this multi-cloud, we had not been able to test.

We always carry out concept tests with partners first to uncover cost validation, among other aspects, before making a decision.