Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration Reviews

During the PoC, we have Office 365 linked to CloudGuard, which validates and checks all of the emails that come in and out. It is also checking and looking for anomalies during logon, e.g., in possible traveling type of scenarios, as we see business emails get compromised. Those pieces of it are really slick.

It also provides you with a lot of reports and visibility on the environment. Sometimes things are not native on Office 365 or you have to purchase additional licensing, but on CloudGuard you have a single pane of glass with all the metrics you need. It gives you a lot of information. For example, it tells you the successful/unsuccessful attempts to log on. 

If we can reduce the number of malicious emails delivered to the inbox of our users, that is a big win. Over 90 percent of breaches start with an email, so the more you can protect your users with the mail firewall piece, the better off you will be. Then, you just do exceptions. That is where endpoint protection comes in. For example, typically, if the mail firewall that we have, which is not CloudGuard, misses something malicious, once a user clicks on that email, opens it, or tries to trigger anything on it, then SandBlast Agent will catch and stop it. Now, that is without using the mail firewall on CloudGuard. However, if we were to stay with CloudGuard and apply the mail firewall, then we will just see less items, messages, and malicious messages being delivered. 

Having CloudGuard would allow us to reduce our vendor footprint. If you have less vendors and tools to manage, it gives a lot of time back to admins and simplifies our overall operations.

It provides visibility of events, what's going on with the environment, what we're missing with our other solution, and the user behavior.

The mail firewall and the Office 365 Control are its two most valuable features.

It is very intuitive. It is a point and click type of deal.

The other slick thing is it has a cleanup process. So, we can set it up and tell it to just deliver files that have been cleaned or transformed to a clean type of document.

The NAVEX metrics that I have been using on the CloudGuard dashboard cannot be exported. If they were to add report exporting capabilities on each of metric objects on the dashboard, that would be awesome.

We have been testing the solution for a month.

There have been no issues with stability so far.

Being SaaS, the scalability is limitless.

Everyone who has an email is using CloudGuard, which is more than 500 users. On top of that, there is also system email addresses. If you count the email addresses or SMTP containers, there are over 1000.

At the moment, on the PoC, we only have two administrators. However, that could easily escalate to around 10. Some of their roles would be troubleshooting with users. Other roles would be email, whitelisting, logging, etc.

I have not needed to use their technical support.

We do have a current mail firewall. What Check Point is getting or receiving wasn't cleaned up or detected by our current mail firewall (Mimecast). In those terms, CloudGuard is detecting far more items than our current mail firewall. Therefore, it is really encouraging to look at CloudGuard as a solution because it's picking up what the other solution is not.

For the Active Directory on Usher, we were just using the regular Microsoft tools.

It is that time of the year when we have to renew licensing, so evaluating tools makes sense. 

Once we get the CloudGuard licensing and get it configured, we will test it out for a month or so, then drop our other service.

The initial setup was point and click. It was really easy. We just jumped on and did it. It took 10 minutes to get it up and running altogether.

We implemented it directly with Check Point.

Hopefully, we will be able to reduce or maintain costs that otherwise would go up. We should definitely be able to reduce the cost on support and management. It should also give us a more robust environment, which doesn't have a price associated with it.

The pricing and licensing are always negotiable.

You can get CloudGuard as part of Infinity. When you do the solution through Infinity, it's a per user type of license cost. That is how we have been looking at it.

We are in a point in time where we are going to have to renew our Endpoint Security licensing. When we do that, we will take advantage of the SaaS management console and just concentrate there. At that point, we will have the SmartConsole, CloudGuard, and Gateway on the SaaS. However, we're not there yet.

We didn't evaluate any other solutions because we're not trying to get more vendors. We are trying to consolidate them.

We were already using the Check Point Endpoint Security solution and are very satisfied with it. That is what brought us to this point. Now, we're happy with this solution, as it's doing well. It is easy to manage and support. It has also reduced our need to support users because we have less issues. We used to have Sophos, and our experience with their endpoint solution moved us to use the VPN with Check Point, and now do a PoC CloudGuard.

Most providers don't give you many options unless you pay for additional licensing. In the case of Microsoft (for example), you have an E3 or E5 Office licensed, which would only cover your usage of the Office Suite, the email, and collaboration tools, but none of the security will apply to it. While Microsoft gives a free version of their MFA solution, it is very cumbersome to have. You either need to bite the bullet and buy the additional licenses, have something like CloudGuard, or both. However, most cloud providers don't give you an out-of-the-box security solution. They rely a lot on you to set up the policies that you want them to follow for your tenant space.

Do your homework. Make sure that you have a good understanding of what tools are part of the solution and make a decision whether you're going to go SaaS or on-prem. My recommendation would be just to go SaaS, as it's a lot easier. You don't have to worry about servers or resources, as it's just on the cloud. 

If you use a third-party to help you implement the solution, it's good to use someone you trust and has experience on the product. 

Check Point has a lot of tools for analysis. This solution is just as good.

Some of the the nice features that you can do with it, we're not doing them today. For example, maybe two or three years in the future when we will host our VPN gateways on the SaaS cloud, then we will use it for our users to remote into our environment. If they had that when we implemented it the VPN, we would have used that instead of the physical gateways. 

I haven't seen any false positives.

I would the solution as a 10 out of 10.

My main use case for Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration is to protect email against all zero-day threats, compromised QR codes, other malicious account attachments, and more.

I do not have anything else to add about how I use it at present.

The best features Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration offers in my experience are unified quarantine, account takeover protection, and de-fishing.

Unified quarantine and de-fishing have made managing threats easier and saved our time also.

Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration has positively impacted my organization, as I have noticed fewer security issues now, and that makes productivity increase also.

The productivity boost has shown itself in my day-to-day work as around a 20% boost in productivity.

Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration could be improved with better integration with third-party solutions.

I do not wish for it to work better with a specific third-party tool or platform, and I do not want to add more about the needed improvements.

I have been using Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration for two years.

Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration is stable.

The scalability of Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration is good.

The customer support for Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration is good.

I would rate the customer support an eight on a scale of one to ten.

Positive

I previously used a different solution, which was Cisco, and I chose Check Point for better security.

The initial setup with Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration was a little complex.

I have seen a return on investment, as I can share relevant metrics like money saved, time saved, and fewer employees needed, all of them.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration has been all good.

I did not evaluate other options besides Cisco before choosing Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration.

My advice to others looking into using Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration is to go for it. It's a good solution.

I would rate Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration an eight out of ten overall because if it was a little less complex, it would make it a ten for me.

My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

I was not offered a gift card or incentive for this review.

I do not have any additional thoughts about Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration as of now.

We use lots of other tech products such as Cisco, Fortinet, and all.

We use the solution to protect Office 365 and Gmail.

The anti-phishing feature is the solution's best feature.

A signature-based filter could improve the solution's AI model for spam email. It works right most of the time.

I've worked with this solution for around a year.

The solution is stable, and I rate its stability a ten out of ten.

The solution is scalable, and I rate its scalability a ten out of ten. Both enterprises and SMBs use this solution.

Technical support for the solution is good.

Positive

It is easy to set up the solution. Deploying the solution takes five minutes.

Harmony Email is an API-based solution. Legacy email gateway clouds, by comparison, only inspect internal emails, which include users' and end users' emails. Check Point inspects all emails before they reach the end user's mailbox.

If you are looking for an anti-phishing solution, Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration is the best. I rate the solution a nine out of ten because the spam filtering is still not good enough, though it does not affect the security.

We have the entire email infrastructure based on Office 365, as well as the file-sharing environment using OneDrive, and Teams as a communication tool. We did not have a specific technology to protect this environment, except that which was provided by Microsoft.

After analyzing the market, we opted for the CheckPoint SaaS solution to cover all of these needs, which has led to a considerable leap in the company's security.

In this way, we now have a secure environment throughout the Office 365 platform, integrated into our SIEM and monitored by our SOC.

In the same way, we have detected malicious files in both OneDrive and SharePoint that have been blocked, which means the elimination of risks in the corporate network.

One of the important characteristics is the visibility that it gives us about suspicious access to accounts, such as several almost simultaneous accesses from impossible geographical locations. This allows us to detect non-legitimate access due to password filtering or brute force attacks.

All this makes the data of our users safer and therefore the integrity of the company is greater.

The first most remarkable thing is the integration with the Office 365 solution, which is easy, fast, and totally transparent for the user. This facilitates its implementation.

Another very noteworthy feature is that the number of false positives tends to zero, which generates great confidence in both administrators and users.

The system can be easily parameterized and as it is integrated into the Infinity ecosystem, it simplifies the administration and centralization of logs.

All this makes the solution simple, reliable, and above all stable.

Check Point has to continue refining the intelligence engine to minimize the number of false positives.

We have been using Check Point Harmony Email & Office for two years.

For two years, we have not had any problems, so we consider the application very stable.

Scalability-wise, it is easy to expand licenses and therefore coverage.

Check Point's technical service is one of the great values ​​of this manufacturer, with prompt attention and they are very professional.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial configuration was completely simple, without any problem.

The integration was carried out by Check Point's professional services, and it was a complete success, both in terms of time and results.

Reasonable cost, quick and easy implementation, and transparent.

We evaluated Palo Alto before selecting Check Point.

All these types of tools are gradually refining the intelligence engines that minimize the number of false positives. It is a constant and evolving work that Check Point knows very well and keeps very active.

One of the functionalities that are in the process of coming out is the protection of Teams, a tool that in the current telework situation is essential. This will represent a new leap in communications security.

In any case, Check Point is working on its entire new Harmony environment and surely new ones will appear in the coming months.

This perimeter firewall provides me control over my perimeter servers and devices. Current Cloud applications are getting good protection from CASB solutions, but are limited to data leakage and application control. Beyond that, I require something to monitor my data that flows inside of my cloud application.

Sophisticated threats like zero-day attacks can't be control by CASB solutions, Instead, we are required to have something that can work using Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning algorithms. This helps to defend my cloud applications against today's attacks.

Sophisticated attacks can't be prevented by normal SaaS security. Cloud Guard SaaS is a technology that prevents not only Sophisticated attacks but affords protection from Email.

Most attacks are successful because of SPAM emails that effectively cause users to fall into the attacker's trap. As Check Point is a leading technology in the industry, it provides maximum protection against email phishing attacks and provides the identity of users and visibility over shadow IT applications.

Along with the email security solution, Cloud Guard is an additional layer of comprehensive security, so we can completely rely on it.

Most organizations that invest in email security opt for MFA. They invest in a Cloud Firewall but they never consider the east-west traffic flow inside their Cloud Applications.

Here, Cloud Guards comes in with the best features, such as protection from zero-day attacks. These are usually reported when we have blades on the perimeter firewall, like Threat Emulation and Extraction or Sandbox. We have complete visibility of email Attacks like spear-phishing, spoofing, etc. Based on domain and URL reputation, it will allow traffic to flow.

Apart from this, we can easily identify users who are going to use cloud applications. These users are logged in via a trusted network or device.

Cloud Guard would be a complete solution if Check Point added a comprehensive data loss solution that included capabilities such as bulk data transfer detection.

I would like to see a centralized gateway so that anyone from any geolocation can access the infrastructure with minimum latency.

I would like to see additional work on protecting against phishing emails by adding more filters to minimize risk or to harden the security.

Stability is the main area that Check Point needs to focus on.

Integration with third-party APIs should be supported, as AI and ML can get more inputs to minimize the false rate ratio.

I have been using Check Point CloudGuard SaaS for more than a year.

Stability is an area that needs to improve.

It can be scale up to maximum limit.

Technical support is good.

We did not previously use another solution before this one. However, one of our customers had implemented an on-premises solution by McAfee.

This solution is easy to implement, although it is required that you have knowledge of the Public Cloud domain.

We are vendors and deploy this solution for our clients.

We definitely see ROI from this product, and it grows and we have a greater dependency on east-west traffic.

Cost is the main concern that every customer takes into consideration, and Check Point always negotiates a price that is affordable. Pricing is based on the requirements and their relationship.

This solution is not for our organization. We are system integrators. We have some projects for our clients, and one of our clients was looking for CloudGuard because they use Check Point Firewall for their on-premise. There are a number of machines and critical servers that they have hosted in AWS; 15 to 20 servers and application servers are hosted in the AWS platform. For those, we have applied Check Point IaaS Firewall for their security and firewall protection.

We are using the stable version that was published in March.

I am confident with the block rate. We host our solution in AWS cloud. If someone tries to hit our applications, they could be a legitimate user or a hacker. So, we have found a number of blocked attempts from the external end.

In terms of technical features, this is the best solution that I have worked with so far. For example:

• URL Filtering
• Application control 
• Threat Prevention
• Sandboxing

We have found threat prevention using sandboxing from Check Point, after buying the Threat Prevention license, helped with the malware prevention rate and reduced zero-day attacks.

For Threat Prevention, I was impressed with this feature and the solution's effectiveness. It has been very good. 

Getting reports and finding threats in the console is easy.

The false positive rate is one of the problems that we had faced with Check Point's information. For example, we have a number of false positives in both CloudGuard SaaS and CloudGuard IaaS, which has been quite disappointing when we find them. However, the moment when we whitelist or blacklist false positive things, the solution gives us more efficient security than other solutions. When I teach Check Point IaaS, I feel like it is putting devices into learning mode and feeding more stuff to the solution, which gives me more efficient security.

We download the SmartConsole from AWS, installing it on our computers, then managing it from our end only on local machines. I need to download agents for every machine from the Check Point instance. To connect with the SmartConsole, then I need to give public access to Check Point's machine. At that moment, there is no configuration in my machine so I need to give some public access to our machine. Giving public access without configuring anything is the first defect or drawback. It takes a few times for every engineer to download the agent and configure the policy, and that takes five to 10 minutes. Within those five to 10 minutes, it is insecure.

The integration with the Check Point console needs improvement, e.g., accessing the SmartConsole is difficult. 

I have been working with Check Point for six to seven months.

I haven't tested the scalability.

The worst thing that I have faced with Check Point has been their support.

I have sat with all the following support teams:

• Cisco
• Fortinet
• SonicWall
• Sophos
• Check Point. 

Other vendor support teams go after fixing the issue the moment that they join the remote session. The problem that I have faced with Check Point support is that they share the case number with me, then it takes at least two days for them to join a remote session with us, even though we have asked for this timeframe to change. Even though we have already explained the problems that we are facing or the business pain points in our network on the call or email, we have to repeat the problem statements again in the console. It can take four or five days to resolve the issue from the moment they understand the problem. This includes the time to teach their R&D or internal team whatever the issue is. I have faced timeframes as long as seven to 10 days for fixing some issues. 

Since this is a cloud-based solution for IaaS and SaaS, I need a different support team for a number of things. So, if they increased or developed their support team, then it would be better for their customers.

Compared to other solutions, like Fortinet, this solution's initial setup is complex. Policy configuration and integrations make Check Point's setup difficult. The setup for on-premise and cloud are the same.

Whenever we need to download the agent from Check Point's console and integrate the SmartConsole with the Check Point solution, the configuration is time consuming and a difficult task for an engineer. Getting the console integrated with the firewall can be difficult, affecting engineers during implementation.

When it comes to Threat Prevention pricing and licensing, it has felt a little costly. For some clients, who are looking at security as their primary concern, then it's better for them. 

I'm in this business as a system integrator, so I need to suggest Check Point to some customers who are comparing products. I sell Check Point, Fortinet, and Palo Alto solutions. In terms of licensing, this solution is quite competitive but very costly. For someone looking at security as a primary concern, they should only invest in Check Point. For a customer who is looking at security combined with pricing, Check Point might not be the core solution for them. In today's market, customers are looking for effective security with efficient pricing, and Check Point is not suitable for these types of customers.

I would like them to improve the pricing.

With respect to Check Point's security features, my clients and I feel every feature given by Check Point has been very helpful for us. We have tried FortiGate, Sophos, and Cisco in some places. Even though Check Point wasn't a market leader, like Cisco and FortiGate, they have the most efficient security. Therefore, we feel it is worth the money for their security features.

The cloud security provided by CloudGuard IaaS is simple compared with the security provided by public cloud providers. If I go for Check Point, then I'm getting the complete features of what a firewall does. When I go for AWS, then by default, I don't get anything other than the ACLs.

The security features have been good. The pricing and licensing strategies have been average, but Check Point's support has been the worst.

I would rate the solution as a seven out of 10.

About one year ago, we decided to switch from the on-premises located email server, based on Zimbra software, to the cloud-based Office 365 provided by Microsoft. We did this because of the increased load that followed after the company's growth.

To provide the security coverage to the new email service, we chose the Check Point CloudGuard SaaS solution. Now it serves as the main protection mechanism, with about 500 users and up to 10,000 emails per day, and there are no problems with the scalability for future growth.

The Check Point CloudGuard SaaS solution is used mostly to prevent malware and zero-day threats. It protects the Microsoft Office 365 cloud email service users of our company against attacks. It is also capable of stopping the sophisticated phishing attacks on the Office 365 accounts and block the possible account hijacks.

It would be really hard to achieve such a level of protection with the on-premises email server without using some email-server specific software, but with CloudGuard SaaS it was easy to integrate the security into the Microsoft email services.

As with most of the other Check Point products, the CloudGuard SaaS has the advanced visibility of the events and alerts. In general, the monitoring and alerting is just great, and the default dashboards provided are used by our support team as part of the SoC solution.

In addition, the CloudGuard SaaS is capable of preventing data leakage, thus may serve as the basic DLP system for the cloud email system. We rely on this functionality and block the emails that contain the card numbers patterns as part of the compliance regulations.

From time to time, the system's administrators notice the increase in the false-positive alerts being reported by CloudGuard SaaS. The increase usually lasts for several days, with the longest we observed being about a week. During these periods, some number of the "clean" emails are blocked and not delivered to the end-users. I hope the Check Point team would work on improving the detection algorithm and the amount of the false-positive alerts would be more predictable, stable on the minimal level. 

We onboarded the Check Point CloudGuard SaaS about a year ago, after switching from our on-prem email system to the cloud-based Office 365.

The solution is mature and stable.

The solution is scalable. We now have about 500 active users and see no issues with the performance. 

We haven't had any support cases opened for Check Point CloudGuard SaaS so far.

We didn't have previous experience with any SaaS security solution before switching.

The setup was straightforward, but quite long due to the need for API integration configuration. In total, it took us about a month to deploy.

The solution was implemented by the in-house team of security engineers and email system administrators, without the prior experience of the CloudGuard SaaS.

We didn't evaluate the other products, since we have a strong expertise among the team with the other Check Point solution, and were satisfied with them.

We use it to secure an email gateway.

People are now thinking twice before clicking on something, and if it's suspicious they don't have a chance to click because it's quarantined.

We also provide a process where someone can request an email from quarantine. There are times when legal email gets through because of the subject line or the content. We're able to check it, and also double-check with our individuals to ask if they expected an email from the sender. They can confirm the sender and it can be released. That added layer of protection is always good.

We need the phishing detection and email quarantine. Once an email is considered malicious, it stays in the quarantine where we can interrogate it. We can check out why it was quarantined and see if it should be delivered to the individual.

With the greater use of mobile phones there is more threat of email being compromised. Having the phishing detection is very valuable because we get hundreds of phishing emails per day. Having something to sift through them and alert us that they may be phishing emails, so that we can go in and further now check them, is a very valuable feature.

We still get some false positives. There are times when legitimate stuff gets flagged and it could be that somebody is expecting a very important email but they don't end up getting it. On the flip side, when we alert Check Point about stuff like this, it is corrected, so they are improving. That's a plus.

In terms of additional features, right now it shows you login activity for Office 365, a bit of a broad overview. I would like to be able to drill down further into that to see real-time login events on a map.

I've been using Check Point CloudGuard SaaS for almost two years.

It has been pretty stable. Sometimes Check Point has a cloud issue and we have had instances where that particular box might have been down, but we get alerted that it's being worked on and when it's back up we are alerted as well. Things happen but they always keep up in the loop.

We haven't needed to really scale up or scale up or down.

We have Office 365 for pretty much the whole company, which is over 1,000 users. CloudGuard has been implemented across 100 percent of our company.

For CloudGuard, specifically, their tech support is very responsive. Once we send an email to the guys we work with, they're immediately ready to set up a meeting or set up a call so that we can work through it.

We didn't have anything prior to CloudGuard. We needed something to catch phishing emails and malicious emails, malware, and to have a sandbox area so that we could check the classification, as well as quarantine and release.

The setup was pretty straightforward. We were up and running within a week.

It is my manager and I who are using and maintaining the solution on a daily basis. In terms of maintenance, we've had mis-classifications of emails where we had to reach out to Check Point and they have assisted and helped us fix any issues that we have come across.

We had assistance from Check Point. They were fairly helpful. It's a fairly new solution so we've had a few false positives. We contacted them and helped them to pinpoint some things they could go ahead and fix.

Because of its features and abilities, it has saved us from a lot of possible breaches. That's always a plus.

It's best to cover all your needs because you're going to want all your emails to be checked.

We were looking at a few other options, although I don't remember which ones.

The difference between them boiled down to money. Price-wise, Check Point was very good, it was very competitive.

Make sure you do your homework and compare all the possible vendors to ensure that you get what you really want out of a solution like this.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using CloudGuard is that even legitimate emails can look suspicious. You need to take that little extra step to check them.