Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) Reviews

I have been using this solution as a perimeter firewall. 

Our organization has ISP-based DDoS protection on the outer attack surface. Then, we have Check Point Next Generation Firewall with an IPS module as a second layer of protection. And then, we have Check Point Access Control, Application, and URL filtering, anti-virus, and anti-bot modules enabled. We also have the cloud-based Check Point Threat Emulation solution and different segmentations on Check Point Firewall as a DMZ zone, internal zone, and external zone. Our internal zones have different segments to improve our security level. We apply it by dividing our network into different VLANs by using the Check Point solution.

Check Point is the first vendor in which we found the stateful firewall terminology. It is always on the top of the list of best firewall solutions. 

Financially, the benefit of Check Point is very high when I compare it with an average firewall solution. At the end of the day, the benefits it provides are already higher than I paid. 

Our business performance is already doubled by the help of Check Point. If we need to talk about efficiency of administrators while managing a security  solution, I consider it as one of the most important item. 

Thanks to Check Point, our security team can easily handle different problems in time.

Check Point gateway and management installation are very easy. After the console-based installation steps, you can continue on the web GUI interface. This is very valuable. It doesn't let you make a simple mistake, which might be a reason to install all the systems from the beginning. It has been designed to give you flexibility as much as needed; not more, not less. It prevents human mistakes, basically.

If I have to say just one thing as the most valuable; I will say it is the most reliable firewall solution in the world. It is easy to prove that when I compare the number of CVEs which are published in a year among firewall vendors.

The routing rules and some more network settings should be listed on the Check Point Smart Console instead of GAIA Web GUI. It might be a little bit confusing when an administrator remembers the location of the settings. Also, it is hard to manage the settings by always jumping from GAIA Web-based graphical user interface to Java based Smart Console dashboard. Also, Check Point Next Generation Firewall has a very detailed and well-organized CP view on the console on both CLISH and expert (/bin/bash) shells; which gives an administrator a real-time monitoring option on the console.

I have been using it for more than six years.

On a heavy load, I haven't experienced packet loss or inconsistent behaviors.

In the beginning, I would consider Check Point solution as not scalable enough. However, after Maestro architecture, it is extremely scalable now. The organizations does not have to pay a lot of money to plan for the next 2-3 years. They are flexible enough to allow for the extension of their systems by adding another module like a blade.

The customer service and support team respond in minutes. If it is a critical issue, you can reach them in seconds via chat.

Positive

I used Palo Alto and Fortinet firewalls before. From Fortinet to Palo Alto it was a big change. 

Fortinet was not a good enough solution as compared to PA. Then, due to finances and some other reasons, I switched to the Check Point and it was one of the best decisions in my life.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just need to define disk allocation for logs and system files and backup files as an amount. Then you can continue with Web GUI to set up network, DNS, etc. settings. Then you complete your setup by installing the Smart Console interface.

The Check Point support team is one of the best. When I need them, they can escalate the ticket to an appropriate level of engineer to fix the problem.

As a security solution in this kind of market, prestige and being reliable cannot be measured with money. It costs more than a million dollars to have a defacement attack. The costs to prevent this kind of attack cannot be measured with money, in my opinion.

I'd advise others to worry about changing their firewall habits from any vendor to Check Point. It will be one of the best decisions of their life. If you have time and money to take care of other vendors, go ahead. However, if you are smart enough to manage your money and time, don't be afraid to give a chance to Check Point solution.

I did get some PoCs from other vendors such as Sophos and some other firewall vendors which are focused on small-size organizations mostly.

I recommend to all system managers and security administrators to try all the enterprise firewall solutions. Then, most likely the final decision will be to use the Check Point Next Generation firewall.

The solution is primarily used as an edge firewall safeguarding any organization or company which are really considering it as their number firewall of choice. In addition, there were also companies that are only using the specific blades, for example, IPS or IPsec, only as their primary solution. It is mostly used as an edge firewall. Sometimes, all security blades are utilized. As a significant part of the whole network infrastructure, Check Point delivers high detection and prevention rates when talking about suspicious and cyberattack types of activities.

Primarily, Check Point played a very vital role in protecting our whole network infrastructure. Having been able to implement such a solution will keep one's organization's security posture well guarded. The best part of Check Point NGFW's operational mechanisms were the Threat Extraction and Threat Emulation blades respectively. The former delivers documents with zero malware in zero seconds and the latter analyzes the original document in an isolated sandbox, identifying unknown threats. 

I'd recommend this kind of firewall for companies considering it since the detection rate for any cyberattacks/suspicious activity is very high (more than 90%).

Check Point NGFW has all the security blades a certain company would want to implement for a network firewall facing the public internet. The upsides of choosing this kind of firewall are traffic acceleration, core acceleration, and interface acceleration which would help in maintaining smooth sailing activity, giving administrators less dilemma. 

Administrators always find it hard and disturbing when such a network bottleneck occurs spontaneously out of nowhere. With that said, Check Point still ranks first among other vendors.

It would be best if the security management server console access is simpler for ease of management. System administrators find it really difficult for the management settings to incorporate easily. Most administrators nowadays are looking into something that offers easy access to a management console or GUI. 

I could not think of other areas for improvement. This is the firewall that I liked the most among other vendors in the market. It's by far the best firewall in the security industry.

I've used the solution for three years already - since the start of my Network Security Engineer career.

Stability-wise, it is perfect! 

When you perform sizing, make sure that the necessary scalability is considered. There's no going back when things like this are compromised.

Lately, Check Point support is nowhere to be found.  We are always attending other customer sessions when, in fact, support is needed for a P1.

Neutral

Mostly, they are the Gartner leaders for NGFW. A switch was made when customers found the solution more secure per doing the proof of concept.

I could say that it is complex even though they are already CCSE and Check Point Expert. There is no way I could find its management easy to use.

We handled the setup in-house.

That there is a money-back guarantee for their business. A business being secured is a business of high return.

There are a lot of evaluations to be done prior to choosing the solution. It caught the customer's attention when the threat extraction/emulation blade really did well during the proof of concept activity.

So far I have mentioned all the things needed to be given importance with regard to an NGFW solution.

We use Check Point on a daily basis. It is our primary gateway to the internet, with an extensive rule base that's used to block unwanted connections and protect our internal networks. 

Multiple gateways are used in a VPN community to build a secure homogenous company network over the Internet. 

We also use the two-factor authentication with RSA-Tokens to authenticate users that are away at conferences or in the home office to the firewall. 

RSA is also used on a portal (called mobile access) on the gateway, where users can easily check their e-mails and access company resources. 

Check Point NGFW has proven to be a reliable firewall. We have been using it for over 15 years now. 

It's offering great security while also being rather easy to manage. 

We evaluated a couple of other firewall solutions over the years, yet always came back for Check Point for a couple of reasons. First, they are the market leader and there are just very many resources online for installing, configuring, debugging, and so on. Second, other firewall solutions may initially be cheaper (especially for basic firewalling), but when you need more features Check Point has a surprisingly good price point. 

I personally like the SmartDashboard client best, which is the rule base management solution. You have a nice overview of the existing rules, and new rules are easily implemented. You can filter by IP, application, rule number, port, or hostname, so you easily find what you are looking for. Rules can be grouped by topic (internal, external, Internet, DMZ, etc.). It all can be well arranged to suit your needs. 

It also offers a dashboard to see recent threats, errors, or other issues with your gateways, as well as Logs for debugging.

Unfortunately, as is the case with many big companies, new features seem to always be more important than fixing the last little bugs that affect only a minor customer base. 

The command line, for instance, is still needed regularly if you want to dive deeper into debugging certain issues. 

While it certainly has improved over the years, it still doesn't feel like a polished product. Some features (e.g. super netting VPN connections) need to be enabled by editing a configuration file, which is sometimes lost upon upgrading to a new version. I'd really like to see more easily manageable debugging solutions. 

I've used the solution for 15 years.

We did have stability issues by using a not officially supported Check Point setup, running it in a virtualization environment, so the Firewall gateway was running on a Xen cluster. In the beginning this was running fine, buter after a couple of months the Checkpoint services kept freezing and needed to be restarted manually. As this started to occur more regularly (a couple of times per week) we migrated the firewall to dedicated hardware.

So I'd recommend always using supported setups.

The biggest enterprises in the world use Check Point products. Scalability is not an issue.

We used Microsoft ISA Server, which is a discontinued product before Check Point. 

Check Point has a pretty competitive price point if you use the features it has to offer. If you need only basic firewalling other solutions may be better suited to your needs. 

We evaluated Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Barracuda. 

I planned to block traffic from foreign countries, however, Check Point does not have the intelligence to determine VPN connections from foreign countries coming through the local VPN.

I also wish Check Point could be more effective by collaborating with Microsoft to establish a different connection for Outlook cellphones or devices not on the domain. I wish to hide my devices like cellphones only allowing them to connect via capsule, however, it applies to all devices. It works well.

It is an excellent, easy-to-acquire system to protect midsize businesses with up to 100+ users that require a security solution that can scale across corporate networks and give us protections against GenV cyberattacks as the business grows. 

What I recommend the most is its central administration. With the smart controller, you can manage all your firewalls from one location. 

Being able to access almost everything in one location manage all your gateways and get all your logs is great. For me, it's the best feature to work with.

The solution is great for cyber attack prevention, data bridges, and other threats. You need intelligent and effective solutions to minimize cyber attacks and Check Point gave me peace in December when they had an unidentified log4j vulnerability.

Our main benefit was the elimination of a server/VM from our data center and the usage of a cloud solution.

Having all the features on the cloud was also a benefit since some products when migrated to cloud solutions lose some features  - but not his one.

The setup is a little bit rough and requires some technical expertise, however, this is expected with a solution as complete as a firewall and especially a Check Point one.

Sometimes debugging is a hassle. We've had issues with VPN debugging in the past. In the more recent versions, later than R80.10, this seems not to be an issue anymore. 

This year we tried to debug performance issues of the gateways, which was cumbersome. When we finally found the performance bottleneck, it was a licensing issue. 

Check Point uses CPU-based licensing for OpenServer, and buying more licenses helped. However, this is the reason we're upgrading to Check Point appliances next year, as OpenServer becomes pricier every year, and Check Point pushes their customers to use their appliances.

I've used the solution for three years.

I have used this product in chemicals, insurance, and industrial sector companies.

The primary use case is to secure the inbound and outbound traffic and secure the DMZ servers. We use this solution for Remote access VPN (on smart view event can see reports more granular level) and IPSEC VPN for using the applications hosted on Public cloud and integrate the customer 3rd parties vendors. 

Using threat prevention helps in securing the customer environment from cyber attacks, ransomware, malwares etc. We use the Sandboxing features to protect the network from zero-day attacks

It improved the performance of the network on large scale. 

It's easy to use and configure. We can build the new firewalls with minimum effort. 

It's easy to upgrade the device. 

You can van view the device health on the smart view monitor and smart event monitor at a more granular level. We're achieving great performance using the latest quantum gateways. You can see the real-time logs on the management and also can configure the logging in redundancy mode. 

Using TCPDUMP, a firewall monitor, and firewall zdebug drop, you can troubleshoot the real-time issues.

We like the SecureXL, CoreXL, and Multi-que.  Using these features improved the performance of the gateway at a more granular level.

The Smart View Event monitor is great. You can see the real-time events on the firewall - including remote access VPN usage.

The smart licensing is great. It's easy to generate the license and apply it on the gateways.

The solution offers very good anti-virus and anti-spam capabilities. It's good security on the network.

Threat Prevention and Sandboxing are useful to have. We're protecting the network from zero-day vulnerabilities and securing the network from the latest cyberattacks.

Pricing for the gateways is too high as compared to the other vendors.

Whenever there is any issue comes checkpoint support ask to keep the gateway on the latest hotfix and OS which is difficult to roll out on all the gateways present in the customer environment.

I am using this product for more than five years.

We can achieve great stability using Check Point Quantum Gateways which improves the performance of the network.

We can achieve great scalability using Check Point Quantum Gateways.

We did not use a different solution. 

The initial setup is straightforward.

We did not evaluate other options.

We use Check Point NGFW as a perimeter firewall.

The most valuable feature of Check Point NGFW is the unparalleled distribution of the network traffic. The central management station they have allows you to manage everything from one place.

Check Point NGFW could improve by introducing machine learning and more modeling dividing the way they manage the ports. However, they have evolved over the last year.

I have been using Check Point NGFW for approximately 15 years.

Check Point NGFW is a stable solution. However, similarly to many other solutions, the stability comes from the engineer that deploys it. It requires a knowledgeable engineer to implement it in the correct way. If you undersize it, for example, you can experience instability.

Check Point NGFW is scalable. The hyper-scale platform can scale up or scale-out. You can buy different powers and stack them.

Check Point NGFW has the most mature technical support in the industry. 

The Check Point company has been around for approximately 30 years and they have everything well documented, similar to other vendors, such as Juniper and Powervault.

I have used other solutions in the past, such as Palo Alto and it has been more expensive. 

The implementation of Check Point NGFW difficulty level depends on the environment. For example, from the initial deployment, it can be easy, but you have to keep your teams learning, they have to consider their traffic size and many other factors. However, the configuration can be difficult, you need a lot of knowledge. Integrating Check Point NGFW with different networks requires a lot of knowledge about the infrastructure.

There are competitors that have more expensive solutions than Check Point NGFW, such as Palo Alto. There are times when Check Point NGFW can have good offerings with a three-year license. The presence of Palo Alto has been heavily invested in marketing. 

From Check Point's perspective, I am not sure how they compared with other vendors. I'm not heavily involved in the process of the quotations.

I have evaluated other solutions.

Check Point NGFW is trying to innovate in the market, but all the other vendors in the market are doing more the same.

I rate Check Point NGFW a nine out of ten.

It's used for a small business network which needed additional protection and threat prevention, remote work capabilities, and excellent support. It's capable of handling multiple public IPs and directing traffic to the appropriate interfaces.  The solution can handle multiple ISPs for backup or aggregation of traffic. 

The environment consists of eight PCs and six other devices which need Internet access and which must be protected.  The ability to restrict traffic to specific network addresses as well as the ability to block malicious hosts trying to get into the network has been great.

Check Point's Next Generation Firewall solution was perfect for reviewing logs, providing an initial layer of anti-virus/malware protection, and providing the support, when needed, to ensure that the product remained up-to-date.  

The ease of searching through the logs for specific incidents is outstanding and very easy to understand. In addition, the categories for web content blocking have been helpful for setting base traffic standards, can block P2P networks, social media, and content not suitable for business.

The protection has been outstanding! I have not had an infected machine behind the firewall since I first installed and started using NGFW. I appreciate the network health reports, the infected devices report, they make my job a lot easier by providing the information right there in the interface. 

With the web category blocking turned on, I can set it and forget it so that inappropriate business content is not brought into my network, it makes it easier to ensure that time isn't being wasted on non-business-related activities.

I really want to see geo-blocking as a feature of NGFW. Way too many hacking attempts from other countries are coming from where we don't travel. In addition, would like to see the VPN use MFA easily, just as another layer of protection.  

Another area of improvement would be a click to block when there are attempted hacks. While the infected device blocking is a good start, you should block traffic from the originator of the traffic; it would be great to be able to do that with any traffic. 

Also, it would be helpful to set thresholds on attempts and then autoblock that traffic for X amount of time, or permanently.

I've used the solution for six years.

I have not had any issues with the device for the past six years; it has just worked.  By that I mean that unlike some cheaper firewalls (consumer grade), the Checkpoint NGFW is enterprise grade, I never had to reboot the firewall to get traffic working again, I would just leave it up and running until a firmware upgrade was available and after the upgrade, the firewall would automatically reboot, but aside from those times, firewall was on 24/7.

The solution is very scalable. There are a lot of different types of devices to choose from.

Anytime I needed support, they've worked with me until the issue has been resolved.  I'd give them an A+.

Positive

We used Watchguard, however, we needed better protection and also wanted to try out Check Point NGFW as I'd heard good things about it.

The initial setup was straightforward. I just needed to figure out how to migrate policies (recreate them) from a different vendor to Check Point. It was relatively easy to figure out and there has extensive documentation available.

We handled the initial setup in-house

Peace of mind is my real ROI.

The pricing is a little on the high side, however, the protection afforded is worth it.

I did not evaluate other solutions. I previously utilized devices from Sonicwall and Watchguard.

Do your research and size the appliance correctly.

The main use of the Check Point NGFW in our organization is the protection of all of our on-site infrastructure. This includes all network elements, physical and virtual servers, end-user equipment, and all other elements that may be linked in the future within our infrastructure.

The product is provisioned in a virtualized environment with the purpose of expanding resources whenever required and generating high availability of the services it offers us, both in the protection of applications through application control and the other blades that make up this solution.

The Check Point Next Generation Firewall solution has allowed us to improve our protection scenario as it is above other products that we have known. It allows us to easily update against the latest security vulnerabilities and has also allowed us to have the opportunity to analyze unexpected behavior in files and applications.

In addition, the constant improvement in the new versions allows us to include better features in the administration and ease in its configuration and allows for the possibility of obtaining important data through the reports that it generates.

The most valuable aspects of this product include:

1. Scalability. It has allowed us to grow in a safe way and in accordance with our particular needs.

2. Support. The attention of both the distribution channels and the manufacturer has allowed us to count on the help needed in critical moments and in an easy way.

3. All in One. This product contains all the services we require for the protection of our entire infrastructure, including also end-users who are most vulnerable.

At the product and service level, I consider that it is within all the expectations that every organization has and each version includes functionalities that you may not have imagined, however, I do believe that they could improve in two aspects:

1. Administration Console. We need to be able to transfer the administration console to a web environment that does not require the installation of a client. On some occasions it is possible, due to specific needs, to have to do it from another computer or from a cell phone.

2. Protection of Web Applications. In our particular case, we have different web applications developed by the same organization, however, that requires a specialized protection element such as a WAF. Having this service or feature within the same solution would be very valuable.

We have been using this product for more than six years.