Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) Reviews

We use the solution for securing all of our servers facing the public network, site-to-site VPN, and SSL VPN like the webserver, e-services, and many other such applications. I have been using the below-mentioned modules:

• Application Control
• SSL Inspection
• URL Filter
• IPS/IDS
• Virus Scanner
• ATP
• DNS Sinkhole
• File Content Scan (Archived Content)
• Link Protection
• Safe Search
• VPN
• Anti Bot/Anti-Spam
• Threat Emulation/Extraction

I can say each and every module has benefited my organization and I would highly recommend others to deploy Check Point solutions.

We have good peace of mind now, after deploying this solution. We could easily defend against zero-day attacks and day-to-day vulnerabilities.

Since the time we deployed the solution, we are 100% safe and secure.

At present, the newly deployed solution is being used for reverse proxy, the site-to-site VPN, and SSL VPN along with the proxy for a few of the machines.

Their threat emulations and Bot Services are a must-try. 

You can just deploy it, sit back, and relax without any issues.

The most valuable features include:

• Application Control
• SSL Inspection
• URL Filter
• IPS/IDS
• Virus Scanner
• ATP
• DNS Sinkhole
• File Content Scan (Archived Content)
• Link Protection
• Safe Search
• VPN
• Anti Bot/Anti-Spam
• Threat Emulation/Extraction

Each and every module provides 100% accuracy. 

Their threat emulations and Bot Services are excellent.

Additionally, they have an excellent support team working around the clock. The engineers have excellent knowledge and provide us with a resolution in a very timely manner.

I have been using Check Point technology since 2011 and recently I have deployed new NGFW, the upgraded version, in a cluster along with the management box.

Check Point updates and upgrades are in a timely manner. There is nothing more that I need in terms of improvement.

Additionally, they have an excellent support team working around the clock. Check Point engineers have excellent knowledge and have provided us with the resolution in a timely manner.

I have been using Check Point technology since 2011 and recently I have deployed the new NGFW. It's the upgraded version and we have it in a cluster along with the management box.

I've used the solution for the last ten years.

The solution is highly stable.

The solution is highly scalable.

Customer service is excellent.

Positive

We did use a different solution originally. We changed to Check Point for achieving high levels of security.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We implemented through a vendor team and I would rate them at a 10 out of 10.

It's excellent and the management is very satisfactory.

It's a very economical option.

We evaluated Palo Alto and Cisco.

It's an excellent solution and offers the best support.

We use Check Point to protect our two data centers under an active scheme. It allows us to protect our customer information while preventing cybersecurity events that put our customers at risk. We use threat prevention and extraction, VPN, firewall blade, VSX, and the entire Check Point management suite. Our setup includes two firewalls in a high availability and VSX environment, respectively. We also take advantage of Check Point's load balancer, which works very well. The failover is performed automatically, without any flashing or noticeable impact on the user. 

Check Point NGFW enabled us to switch from a decentralized solution with seven firewalls to a solution that's easier to manage with high-availability firewalls and capabilities that were previously lacking in NGFX. It helped us connect our users working remotely during the quarantine while maintaining our security policies and avoiding zero-day attacks. 

The solution makes administration more straightforward because we can replicate the policies in both data centers with a single click, helping us to deploy quickly in both gateways without problems.

Check Point's most useful feature is threat prevention and extraction. It was tough to manage seven firewalls and a perimeter solution for IPS, anti-malware, anti-bot, and sandboxing. 

Integrating everything in Check Point allows us to see all the attacks that are blocked with our perimeter countermeasures every day. Check Point's high detection rate improves our overall security posture, and we can achieve a low rate of false positives through a few adjustments to the configuration.

It could be easier to access the installation of the Hostfix for VSX solutions. The CLI commands help us understand how virtual firewalls behave in terms of processor, memory, and other aspects. More graphic visualizations of CPUSE commands would be a welcome improvement, and Check Point could expand scripts to run within the solution for multiple tasks.

I've been using Check Point NGFW for seven years

Check Point works well in a high-availability setup, and the failover is fast. We had very few instances of unavailability. It happened once when we had hard disk issues, but the RMA process was quite simple, and the replacement part came quickly.

We added new Check Point firewalls twice this year, and it was relatively simple. You can quickly migrate the configurations, and your new firewall is ready to go after a few adjustments to the settings.

Check Point's support has been excellent, and they respond immediately via phone, chat, and email. In particular, I think the chat support was great. 

Positive

Previously, we were using seven open-source firewalls, and we decided to go for a solution with good ratings from NGFW users. We wanted something well-positioned in the market that had good support.

Migrating from an open-source, decentralized setup with seven firewalls to centralized management was complex, but it was less complicated than we expected thanks to Check Point’s management features. The ability to perform a parallel startup helped a lot during deployment.

A vendor team helped us, and the migration was smooth. The Check Point engineers who worked for our partner were well trained to handle the implementation.

Check Point NGFW can be expensive compared to other competitors, but the price matches the functionality and efficiency of the solution.

We considered Fortinet, Palo Alto, and SonicWall before settling on Check Point

We are using Firewall Intrusion Prevention and URL Filtering, and we just purchased the Endpoint Protection package for our workstations.

It is deployed on-premises. We have two Check Point systems in place. We have one that's between our business network and the outside world, and we also have one that's between our business network and our internal SCADA system.

We haven't updated to version 81, so we're still at version 80.

It has provided us with great protection from threats. I've been here 30 years, and we've had two incidents, and none of them were within the time we've used Check Point.

The console or the single interface on the blades is most valuable.

The only thing that we've seen is instances where console and administrative interfaces get locked up or freeze, and we have to get the machine rebooted.

I have been using this solution for probably 10 years.

I would rate it a nine out of 10 in terms of stability.

Its scalability is very good. Our entire force is about 190 people, and most of them use it at some point just because they are going out to the internet and have that protection for the workstations. 

It is being used extensively. Everyone is using it, and we do have plans to increase the functionality on the device.

They provide really good support. I would rate them a five out of five. 

I can't remember the product, but what we had initially was an entry-level device. It was a single-purpose firewall. We went up to an enterprise solution that had additional features.

It was pretty simple to transfer the old firewall configuration to the new one. So, it was pretty straightforward and easy. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of effortlessness.

It took over a month. We ran two systems. We built a new system for a couple of weeks before switching over completely.

We used a consultant. Our experience with them was very good.

For deployment and maintenance, we have five people on our staff. We have to do some maintenance on it. It's pretty much scheduled to rotate between us so that we keep our skills fresh.

We've not done an initial study on any kind of ROI. We rarely do. In positives, we try to perform a yearly risk assessment of our systems, and we find very few vulnerabilities. So, it is doing what it's supposed to. It is keeping us safe.

Its cost is a little higher than other products.

We evaluated other options, but I don't remember their names. We basically went to the consultant we deal with for security-related things and said, "What's out there? What do you recommend?" He gave us three and recommended that the Check Point was probably the lead one.

I would advise comparing it to the other products.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. It has served us very well and given us very few headaches.

Checkpoint Firewall provides advanced security for the organization and its connection to the members/participants. The Check Point FW controls access and traffic to and from the internal and external networks. The Check Point Firewall rule base defines the access control and network performance to help our organization achieve the below security goals:

• Only allows authorized connections and prevents vulnerabilities in a network
• Gives authorized users access to the correct internal networks
• Optimizes network performance and efficiently inspects connections

Check Point Firewall provides advanced security for the organization. The FW controls access and traffic to/from the internal and external networks. The Firewall rule base defines the access control and network performance to help our organization achieve the below security advantages:

• Only allows authorized connections and prevents vulnerabilities in a network
• Gives authorized users access to the correct internal networks
• Optimizes network performance and efficiently inspects connections
• Protection of all assets from internal and external threats

The following features are most valuable: 

• Threat prevention
• Malware prevention
• IPS
• IDS
  

Check Point should improve services related to the cloud-based solution. Due to these challenging times, most organizations seek to move to cloud-based implementation to minimize the cost and for easy deployment, access, and remote support. 

The Next-Generation Firewall should also be focused on zero-day threats as attacks have improved the past few years. They need to ensure that all connections and nodes are being protected. 

Sandblast technology is also a good tool as it offers enterprise solutions on malware detection and prevention.

I've used the solution for five years.

The solution is stable and can support all OS deployments. It's easy to manage.

We recommend the product as it is excellent and very scalable.

There have been no issues regarding the support from Check Point and the local vendor.

Positive

We previously used Fortinet.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

We did the deployment in-house and with a vendor team. The level of expertise was a 10/10.

The solution is easy to deploy. The pricing is lower than other solutions. We've had no issue with licensing.

We looked into Watchguard, Palo Alto, and Sophos.

We need more information on the ability to collaborate enterprise support.

Our business houses just over 100 staff, along with over 200 devices ranging from mobile to tablets, computers, laptops, and Servers. 

We use a Check Point 5100 cluster running R80.40 to protect our business from external threats. 

Our network is also extended to the likes of Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and other 3rd parties utilizing secure VPN tunnels terminating on our Check Point 5100 cluster. 

Our business also offers the ability of hybrid working - which is only possible with our Check Point solution.

Prior to using Check Point, we had a Draytek small business firewall, the Draytek would often hard lock, which resulted in the loss of internet connectivity for the business. The only way around this was to reboot the Draytek device which in turn would lose logging data as to what was causing the issue. 

Moving onto Check Point completely solved this problem. The hardware is much more capable and the logging and alerting functionality means, should anything happen (like it did with the Draytek), we would have visibility on the logs which would give us a direction for troubleshooting and mitigation. 

Check Point offers a secure VPN client. We distribute to our agents via group policy. Our agents can then connect to our network when working from home - which was a game-changer due to the recent pandemic situation. 

Check Point also offers a mobile app capsule connect which, as a system administrator, has proven very useful when a high-priority issue occurs. I am able to connect to my internal network via a phone or tablet - which has proven useful in some scenarios. 

As a system administrator my favourite part of Check Point is the smart view tracker. This alone is a must-have tool for tracking all traffic traversing the Check Point appliance. It makes troubleshooting much easier. This software alone sets Check Point out in front of the competition.

Check Point is very feature-rich. There aren't any features missing or that I am awaiting in a future release. 

The only downside to Check Point, is, due to the vast expanse of configurable options, it does become easily overwhelming - especially if your coming from a small business solution like Draytek. 

Check Point comes with a very steep learning curve. However, they do offer a solid knowledge base. Some issues I have encountered in my five years have only been resolvable via manually editing configuration files and using the CLI. Users need to keep this in mind as not everything can be configured via the web interface or their smart dashboard software. 

I've used the solution for five years.

The solution was not always stable when running the older R77.30 version. Paired with a mid-spec box, we did find some issues with performance on more than one occasion, specifically the network would slow to a halt until a system reboot, there was nothing within the error logging and our external SOC couldnt find anything either. We'd often when updating the firewall policy it would fail to deploy usually taking around three or four policy pushes each taking about 20 minutes. We are now running much faster hardware with the later R80.30 release and those issues have completely disappeared.

Scaling is dependant on the size of your network. Check Point does offer a wide range of lower to high spec appliances depending on your scale set.

I've only had two instances using their support as we have a third party on contract for third-line issues that I cannot resolve. They were prompt yet not shy about pointing out potential issues with third parties and it not being their appliance. 

Positive

We used Draytek. It didn't offer the security features that Check Point does and we were a victim to a successful attack from external sources which Check Point would have caught. We also found the hardware of Draytek was too underpowered to handle the size of our network. 

A third party installed the appliances initially. It is a complex process, as Check Point is vast in features and very configurable. You find yourself using the web interface, their own management software smart dashboard, and a mixture of CLI and config files to get your end result. 

We implemented it through a vendor team. Their level of expertise ranged as we moved through three separate technicians during our installation which was problematic. I wouldn't use this particular vendor again. That said, this was nothing against Check Point. 

You cannot put a price on security. Check Point is a field leader. However, it comes at a high price. 

If you have no experience with Check Point and you are on a deadline, it's essential you find a company certified to help with the deployment and configuration. The feature set is rich however, it's not always user-friendly. 

Pricing, including licensing, is very expensive compared to alternate products such as Sophos, Barracuda, or FortiGate

We evaluated Fortigate, Sophos XG, and Barracuda. However, ultimately the decision boiled down to our parent company already using Check Point. 

The primary use case for these firewalls is to protect our perimeter from unwanted traffic in and out of our network as well as to control the flow of data to comply with our company security policies. 

It also plays an integral part in restricting or granting access at a granular level for certain users or vendors allowing us to monitor and protect end-customer data as well as protecting our users and network from malware, bots, ransomware and other bad actors that could disrupt our business operations.

Check Point NGFW products have improved the operation of our organization by allowing us to secure our perimeter from attacks, probes, malware, DDoS, bots and general bad actors. It also allows us to secure outbound traffic from our users. 

It allows us to fine tune how we allow users to access resources both in our DMZ and externally. This helps us to secure customer and user data in order to prevent privacy issues, prevent loss of operations or downtime which we cannot accept. 

Being able to use the products in redundant pairs has also allowed us to provide a more stable network.

There are several useful features that we utilize that are now valuable assets in terms of protecting the network. These would include user identification (ID Collector), IPS, antibot, antivirus, application, and URL filtering as well as the standard firewall security rules. They all work together to provide layers of security to protect both inbound and outbound traffic in order to minimize loss of private data as well as to ensure our network is free of bad actors attempting to use malware or ransomware against us.

Check Point could improve its products by working on stability. Overall, it is a stable platform, however, at times we have issues with 'quirks' and bugs that cause issues for our end users and typically are not straightforward to fix. 

Another issue that presents itself is upgrading. Small hot fixes are not problematic. That said, updating to a new version of the OS has been an absolute nightmare and caused significant downtime and a number of issues - not to mention wasted engineering time. Simplify the upgrade process and they may regain confidence in this area!

I'd like to see more use of applications and URLs in security policies moving forwards.

I've worked with the solution for seven years across two different companies.

The stability is good, yet it could use some improvement.

The scalability is very good.

It has always been slow and difficult to use technical support. It depends on a case-by-case basis, however, you have to chase and manage the case yourself or it will go nowhere. This likely comes down to a lack of experienced agents.

Neutral

We previously used Cisco ASA. We switched due to the fact that Cisco's product was very hard to manage and lacked any real intelligence.

The initial setup is complex. A very large and multifaceted environment will always be complex to configure.

We used vendor support and account teams and in-house technical engineering.

It's expensive, however, compared to the cost of not protecting the network properly, it's worth the cost.

We looked at Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Cisco.

Carefully consider the vendor before making a leap. It's very difficult and costly to change vendors at a later date.

In our organization, we are using distributed device management. Here, management and distributed devices are separate deployments. Therefore, our management is very easy in our organization for traffic management. Here, tier architectures are used. That smart console, smart getaway, and management are different devices. Each device is connected to the other. 

Threat prevention is used as well. Basically, threat prevention is used for preventative management traffic entering into our internal organization. The hash value is used whether traffic is legitimate or not for distributed traffic. 

We are using Check Point for URL filtering. 

In our organization, we are using policy configurations where various policies are configured for internal to outside organization communication, and our DM's are there too. Various zones are created in our organization. 

For each particular zone, if I want to communicate with the external zone, then I need to create a policy for internal to external. Various rules can be created, particularly for organization communication outside the organization. It will be configured in our organization and four gateways are there allowing for our four different locations to communicate. 

In our HR deployment, hiring deployment, there is a new and legacy mode that we are currently using.

The distributed deployment is very helpful. This way, the burden on each device is less and management is very easy and CPU process utilization will be not high on a particular device - it'll be distributed on each device. Management is very easy.

We like that it is a next-generation firewall where hackers would need to inspect down to a seventh layer, an application layer, and that offers us better protection. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

The solution can scale.

We would like to see constant improvement in anti-malware functionality and anti-threat protection.

Various functions affect our organization's traffic performance.

They need more focus on the stability of IP security.

The organization has used the solution for five years, however, I only joined the company two years ago. 

It provides very good stability for traffic management and network flow. We monitor various locks that will be there for internal and external traffic. I'd like, however, more stability of IP security, more of that is needed. Sometimes there is an issue in IP security clarity.

The scale is currently very good. In our organization around 3000 or more employees use it. There is two IT personnel that will configure 30 Check Points, 13,500 gateways will be there and it will handle around 3000 plus employees. 

We will increase usage. Currently, one new branch will be open. They are also migrating from Fortinet to Check Point's firewall. The previous they did 40 deployments here, however, currently they're migrating to the Check Point next-generation firewall.

Tech support is very good. After logging the call, if there is an issue discovered, they are very supportive. They are helpful and responsive. We've very happy with them.

Positive

We used to use Fortinet, however, it did not go deep enough and check down to layer seven.

The initial setup was straightforward. That said, I wasn't part of the initial setup, as it was set up before I came to work with the organization.

I'm comfortable with the licensing. The pricing, for what you get, is pretty reasonable. 

I'm an end-user of the product. I don't have a specific business relationship with the company.

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

The primary use case of this solution is to protect the organization's LAN network from cyber threats.

With the help of Check Point NGFW, we are able to prevent attacks like phishing, ransomware, zero-day attacks, malware, etc.

The thing I like about this product is its capability of auto NAT and auto zone detection.

Service support can be improved.

I've been using the solution for the last year. 

The stability is the best.

The scalability is good.

Customer service and support can be improved.

Neutral

No, I did not use a different solution. 

The initial setup is easy.

We implemented it through our in-house team.

For the current market situation setup cost, pricing, and licensing look fine.

No, I did not evaluate other options.