Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) Reviews

I protect customers and other types of data by ensuring a secure environment. Check Point allows me to deploy quickly and securely, along with using more advanced detection and prevention. By securing multiple sites and various infrastructure elements, I have reduced my overall workload.

I'm using a lot of permanent tunnels and protecting them to ensure that monitoring customer infrastructure is not compromised in any way, shape, or form.

Various hardware has been deployed at proper sizing for customers and the equipment is stable without the need for a lot of custom configuration

By deploying Check Point, it has made it easier to manage everything from a single interface. The management dashboard and policies are on its single pane of glass. This has allowed for faster resolution of problems during deployment.

Being able to look at log events and sort quickly for information in regards to problems with connectivity or traffic makes it easier to troubleshoot and gain other insights into traffic-related problems.

Overall, the insights provided also allow for data to be presented to customers to give them an overall perspective of their security.

The management interface is well designed and easy to understand. It reduces the time for deployment, changes, and onboarding new customers.

The logging facility is amazing and gives great insights into traffic. Although Event Management is also amazing, it can be cost-prohibitive for other companies to onboard.

The ability to deploy VPN communities makes onboarding new sites easy. Multi-site configurations can be deployed with very little oversight and with minimal additional work after the initial deployment is successful.

I would like to see better Data Leakage protection options and easier-to-understand deployment models for this. I have been working with DLP for a while now and find that other vendors seem to be doing better at this. That said, having to deploy another solution adds other costs.

Some error messages could be better and more specific. The days of generic error messages should be over by now to allow faster, better insights into fixes for any traffic-related problems.

Some of the sizings of firewalls for deployment seem not exact and require some tweaking based on real-world traffic and connectivity types (for example, PPPoE).

I have been deploying Check Point firewalls for about 12 years and still work with them on many projects. I trust them to protect my infrastructure along with other tools.

I will continue to use Check Point as long as they keep pace with the innovation currently in place without sacrificing customer service.

The product is very stable once deployed.

So far, no issues with scalability have been detected - other than hardware replacement on the growth of traffic

The initial setup has some come complexities, however, that is the nature with multiple types of connectivity and different customer requirements.

Check Point firewalls are/were deployed in various parts of our network to achieve perimeter defense and internal network segmentation. 

In addition to the firewall functionality, each appliance also leveraged Check Point's IPS blades. The perimeter Check Point appliances were also responsible for terminating any and all site-to-site VPN connections with third parties. 

All traffic from remote locations, remote VPN users, and egress traffic to the internet is filtered through the Check Point equipment at some point in our network.

Check Point has not improved our organization. We have observed a sharp decline in the quality of both products and support. 

Over the last several years, there has not been a single week where we have not had an outstanding issue open with Check Point support's advanced tier teams. 

Initially, we had incredibly impactful issues regarding their scalable platform hardware (which is being discontinued in favor of Maestro) to the point we were forced to rip them out due to them being completely unreliable. 

Check Point support has also seen a significant drop in quality, despite my organization even being a Diamond Support customer with Check Point. We fully believe it would be a wiser investment of time to call Geek Squad rather than Check Point.

The only area that Check Point still seems to excel in is their logging. Reviewing logs on Check Point is a snappy and intuitive process that allows the end-user to filter down traffic to specifically what they're looking for very easily and even with little knowledge of Check Point. 

The ability to create filters on the fly in the GUI with simple clicks to various areas of the log is fantastic and allows one to find exactly what they're looking for with very little effort. Note that this is probably the only thing Check Point still has going for it.

Check Point's support, at all levels, needs a complete overhaul. The Check Point support staff aren't even shy about telling you how understaffed, underpaid, and underappreciated they are. Any engineer with a hint of talent is pulled from general support to higher tiers, and then, once they reach a level of competency above that of your average acorn, they leave for better-paying jobs elsewhere. 

My organization witnessed this first hand fighting through the lower tiers of support and working frequently with the scalable platform team. When we switched to Diamond Support we saw no significant improvement in support save for shorter hold times.

I have personally used Check Point solutions for nearly ten years. My organization has used Check Point for 15+ years.

The solution is absolutely unstable. My organization follows vendor best practices exactly and has every deployment vetted by multiple levels within the vendor. Despite this, Check Point hardware has repeatedly proved unreliable at best, sometimes resulting in total outages for our company. 

My current organization has used Check Point for the relevant past and is only recently completely switching vendors to Palo Alto.

All current Check Point hardware is destined for the recycle bin. There is a pretty low ROI.

Most firewall vendors, Check Point included, make the selection of hardware easy enough based on projected usage. Likewise setup on many vendors in greenfield environments is simple enough and should not require professional services.

I was not involved with the initial deployment of Check Point in our environment as it was before my time. However, each subsequent deployment I have been involved in with Check Point was used based on the existing relationship. Once the issues became too impactful and we realized we had no hope of seeing any improvements we began efforts to rip out the existing Check Point equipment.

Do not let Check Point's past success lure you into their current state of bottom of the barrel.

We are using the Check Point firewall for our perimeter security.

The security solution works as well on-premise and in the Azure Cloud. We are using central management to configure the security policy of both gateways.

We are also using a Site2Site VPN for connecting our locations. This VPN is also realized with the same firewall systems.

In order to simplify the process of generation reviews of actual security incidents, we have implemented SmartReport for generating automated and special customized security reports for our documentation department.

Since the security policy of all firewall gateways can be defined centrally on the Check Point firewall management server, it is a lot easier to generate a secure and safe policy for all locations.

Since we can define policy operators for dedicated traffic selections, some of the lower IT staff can easily allow or block services or servers or create their own policy without interfering or compromising the rest of the security policy.

This makes the administration and coordination of the policy a lot easier for us

Since the log files of all services are collected on the management server there is an easy and good view of all actual connections, attacks, or security risks.

In addition, when using the SmartEvent software blade, you get the possibility to have an easy to configure event correlation system, which will automatically fire mail alerts or can even block IP addresses if there are network or security anomalies detected on the firewall system.

This is also possible if the services are allowed - for example, if there are flooding attacks on server systems.

For example, this has prevented our Citrix Netscaler from being taken down during attacks.

Although there is a lot of automation and pattern that can be classified automatically, the IPS systems are sometimes a little bit complicated, and doing the fine-tuning in over 20,000 patterns is hard to do. This has been improved in the last versions, however, it can still be made a little bit better. 

For example, the automatic classification of which pattern should be activated is very simple yet lacks some special configuration options (for example if you want to have more than one classification pattern for the activation).

The HTTPS inspection is very tricky, too. Since there are a lot of applications that are using certificate pinning, most of the SSL traffic (especially to the big cloud provider) must pass without inspection.

Since attackers also use these clouds, there is a problem in getting your security definitions to work.

Of course, this is not a Check Point-specific problem and rather a problem in the HTTPS inspection itself.

There is the need to know which sites are accessed by our staff and to get the visited URLs, to get the internal security policy working. The SSL classification feature of Check Point is a good intention, yet not as good as needed.

I've used the solution for more than ten years.

We do not have any problems with stability.

There is a hardware solution for every type of throughput. It is very good that in the datasheets you get the throughput of the different types of network traffic.

It is better not to choose solutions bigger than needed, or to have some resources left over.

Most of the support calls are answered very quickly. However, if you have a problem and you have to get development involved, the response gets slower.

Most of the time, you will find all necessary information in the Support Center or on the collaboration sites.

Neutral

We were using Cisco firewalls before. We had the need to implement Universal Threat Protection and the configuration of the Firepower system of Cisco was more complicated than the integrated policy configuration of Check Point.

The setup is straightforward. The documentation is very good.

We have implemented it completely in-house.

ROI is really hard to pinpoint. However, if we were using another security solution, our personal efforts to maintain it would double.

It is very hard to compare different firewall solutions and get a comparable price. Check Point tends to be very expansive, however, if you have a deeper look at other vendors, the costs are almost the same.

Due to the good integration and central management, Check Point is easier to maintain than other solutions.

In addition, there are good small office boxes from CheckPoint with a very good price - the features of these boxes are enough for small enterprises or branch offices.

We have evaluated Cisco Firepower and the FortiGate firewall solutions in the past.

The solution protects our internal network (traffic between VLANS) and also is used as a perimeter firewall in our on-premise and cloud environments. Also, we use functionalities such as IPS, ABOT, AV, VPN, and mobile access.

We have about 200 small branches distributed all over the world protected with 1,430 devices and connected via VPN to AWS Cloud Guard and Check Point firewall.

We also have endpoint protection in about 500 devices with firewalls, antimalware, antibot, anti-ransomware, threat emulation and prevention enabled, and also port control.

We have NGTX blades so that we have protection against known and unknown attacks (zero-day). In terms of protection, we passed from none to one of the most advanced protections in the market. 

Regarding endpoints, we can see a lot of prevented attacks and phishing attempts every day. We can see the whole solution running in our environment correctly.

We gained a lot of visibility of traffic patterns, destinations, and use of network (internal and external) resources due to the logs and views within the Smartconsole.

The centrally managed firewalls are great. We can save a lot of configuration time in configuration tasks. We have deployed about 200 devices in record time due to the fact that we use a unique policy for almost all of them.

Logs, Views and Reports are the most detailed compared to other vendors (FortiGate, etc.) We can see a lot of detail in the logs and also we can configure any report we need without any problem and in two clicks.

We can see that, for IPS signatures, we have updates every day, sometimes twice a day, so we see a lot of effort from the vendor. They really try to protect our environment from known attacks and vulnerabilities.

We try to not depend of the SMS application and leave it as a web application. Sometimes it takes a long time to authenticate and open correctly. It's a windows application, so you need a machine to install the application on.

If you have the standard support level, sometimes they take a long time to understand or even give you a solution or good workaround to a problematic situation. We had a problem in the past with a VPN blade that lead some devices to flap the VPN up and down. That case lasted 6 months as we were jumping between Check Point's internal departments in order to find a solution on our problem.

I've used the solution for eight years.

We are very happy regarding the stability. In last year, we only have had three problems regarding software bugs or stability problems.

They have a solution called Maestro where you can add devices in 10 minutes to scale the solution without doing a lot of configuration.

In our environment, we have a classic deployment so it's not as easy to scale; you need to do some configuration and have a maintenance window in which to do it. 

We have the standard support service. I can't say anything too bad and nothing too good. It's normal. Regarding customer service at the local office, I can say that it is very good. They have helped us a lot in deploying some complex characteristics without cost.

Neutral

We have Cisco, however, that's for networking and not security. 

The installation was done by a partner, however, it was very straightforward.

The product was implemented by a partner and their expertise was very good.

There are a lot of licenses for almost every feature, therefore, it's possible to buy only the licenses needed and not a bundle that would have unused features. That leads to savings in costs.

We have evaluated FortiGate, and we saw that it was more user-friendly, however, some characteristics we needed in regards to complex VPN deployments were only available from Check Point.

It is a bit expensive according to the required blades but it is a platform that is worth having as security in a corporate.

I have worked for several years with the Check Point platform (NGFW) and it is by far the most stable in hardware and software.

It is a very friendly platform and easy to configure. It is true that it is a bit expensive (according to the required blades), however, it is a platform that is worth having as security in a corporate environment. 

I've used the solution for more than five years.

I use the NGFW as a Firewalling device, for VPN tunneling, and for virtual patching. My environment is a two-tier network environment. I also use the Check Point NGFW as an IPS.

It really has improved my organization in terms of protecting my network against intrusion and zero days. I have been able to explicitly configure the blocking of certain attack vectors using Check Point NGFW.

The firewalling feature and the VPN functionality are excellent. With the firewalling functionality, I have been able to ward off intrusion from outside the network. With the VPN functionality, I have been able to allow secure remote connections from external customers and staff. 

CheckPoint would do good to add new features such as UEBA(User and Entity Behavior Analytics). 

They should also improve on the effectiveness of their antivirus. It should be more effective than competitors.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

I have been using Check Point NGFW for five years.

The product is very stable with no crashing or configuration corruption.

The solution is highly scalable and responsive.

The vendor is very professional and has the know-how.

Positive

I used to use the Cisco ASA 5500 series firewalling device.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The product was implemented through a third-party vendor.

We saw an ROI within one year.

It is very competitive relative to others on the market.

I was shown the POC and I fell in love with the fact that the Check Point NGFW has a GUI that allows for easy configuration. It also does firewalls very well. Therefore, I did not look at other options.

It is an awesome product!

We use five NGFWs for four of our sites, with our primary site having an active/backup HA pair. All sites are running anti-virus/malware/bots as well as HTTPS Inspection, IPS/IDS, threat emulation, application filtering, and identity awareness. These are our first line of defense at the perimeter of our network and we have seen a decrease in the number of detections on our endpoints. We've also implemented these firewalls to handle our external VPN connections from remote clients. We've had a few small hiccups, however, there was nothing Check Point support wasn't able to resolve.

This solution has improved our organization by allowing us to use one management point where everyone can see the current state, future changes, and logging for our perimeter. We've been able to streamline our staff to use one primary and two backup users for support. Previously, we did not have a good way to allow Remote Users to VPN directly to our network. Once we implemented and worked with Check Point, they showed us what their solution was capable of and worked with us to allow 300 remote workers to connect to our network and share policies. 

We've found threat emulation, application control (with identity awareness), and HTTPS inspection to be the most valuable aspects. It allows managers the flexibility to grant access to high-risk sites based on groups/roles and yet still be protected with threat emulation and HTTPS inspection. We've seen the rate of detection on our endpoints plummet. 

I've found that, over the last 4 years, they have constantly improved the user interface (SmartConsole) as they have moved away from four Control panels for different functions and are constantly adding new features with no impact on our availability during upgrades.

The improvement could come from better monitoring of traffic data in and out of the firewall. I'd also like to see more built-in automation in regards to activity against the firewall to trigger an automatic response for a period of time.

There is currently no way to allow a user to have access for X period of time. I also find that keeping up with the IPS additions to be a three-stage process which includes having to go to email to see new updates, reviewing those updates on the firewall, and then making necessary changes. I would like to see these new IPS updates shown as a notification when I log in (as an alert) so I can review and modify from one pane.

I have been using this solution for four years, however, they've been installed for six years at our company.

In the four years I have worked on the five firewalls we have not had any downtime caused by stability issues. We've had more issues with our ISP/people hitting the ISP equipment, for example there have been three accidents at the near by intersection that has damage the network cabinet or digging has cut the line.

We haven't had any issues where the Firewall has had a memory leak, rebooted, corrupted or had a NIC fail. 

Our team didn't account for a vast increase in workload as new features were added to our firewall (HTTPS inspection, threat emulation, etc.) and therefore we bought the lowest tier for what we thought we would need. We've found that this is a little too strenuous on our gateway and are working on purchasing more powerful firewalls based on the recommendation of our local Check Point engineer.  

I've always been able to get in contact with Check Point at the right level within their SLA. Everyone has been helpful with tickets requiring escalation.

Positive

I have not been here while a different solution has been used. We do use a separate brand of firewall internally to prevent an exploit against Check Point, allowing someone to penetrate the perimeter and the internal firewall containers.

I was not involved with the initial setup. That said, I have brought up three new sites, and adding a new firewall to our infrastructure has gone off without a hitch.

We handled the implementation in-house.

Check Point Firewalls are more expensive from what I have seen compared to the competition and the yearly licensing does periodically increase. We've seen an increase of 8% over one year (new features were wrapped into the license). 

I was not involved with the evaluation process; I was told that Cisco Firewalls and SonicWall were evaluated at that time.

You're paying a premium price, for what is a premium product and support. I have opened several tickets with their support team and have had excellent service each time.  

We use it as a firewall solution with built-in VPN capabilities, anti-virus, and malware detection. It has good blocking abilities and is easy to set up and maintain.  

They allow VOIP traffic to pass through the firewall as well to onsite PBXes. The firewalls themselves are for SMB environments, with between five and 25 users at different sites and in different states.  

Employees regularly work from home, so a VPN solution is a necessity to allow for remote file shares and or/remote desktop through a encrypted VPN tunnel.  

With the added ability to have multiple VPN methods to connect, the solution has worked well for remote workers who are either utilizing the Check Point VPN client or the SSL VPN web client.

The throughput with full threat detection is adequate for the Internet circuit installed at most of the client locations and is in fact better than the previous firewall solution.

The support has been great whenever Check Point has been contacted. They help resolve an issue or explain how to perform some necessary action. 

For the most part, the NGFW is easy to understand and set up and there are, of course, advanced options if a non-standard problem arises.

The reporting feature has been helpful to get a quick understanding of network traffic and threats identified. Even if a false positive is identified, it's been helpful to perform more of a deep dive into what triggered the detection and to certify that there is a problem or that there isn't a problem.

Anti-virus and anti-malware on the NGFW device have been pretty solid and have caught many threats before they entered the network.

The event logs are relatively informative and can provide information on why traffic was accepted or rejected.

Geo-blocking would be very useful. There are too many attempts to infiltrate by non-country users. I can block access by IP address or IP network, however, a country-level blocking would be more useful and much quicker to implement.

It would also be nice to have a smaller home user device that could automatically contact the main firewall and establish a VPN connection. This would be great for remote users to secure their work PC at home.

On the front page of the appliance, it lists current threats identified. It would be helpful if clicking on the threat took you to the exact logs instead of showing all host logs as you still have to scroll through the host logs to find the information you are looking for.

I have been using Check Point since 2016. It's been a little over five years.

We've had very few issues; the builds themselves haven't had any issues.

The solution is very scalable; Check Point has a variety of NGSW devices that can scale with the user base.

Support is excellent, quick to respond, and quick to provide a resolution to any problem.

Positive

We used Watchguard. We switched due to the threat protection and we felt that Check Point did a better job of providing protection.

The initial setup is straightforward and plug and play for a basic configuration to get you started. You can then begin building the NAT and policy rules, which are easy enough to do.

We implemented the solution in-house.

The malware blocking capabilities more than paid for the cost of the device and license.

I'd advise users to size their appliance correctly before purchasing it.

We did not evaluate other options. 

We used this firewall to replace a faulty Cisco 2500. The main solution needed packet filtering and port restriction. We found the functionality handy for filtering email spam. There's a helpful API embedded in the device. 

The online version of the documentation is well written.

The speed of the device is really impressive as it is able to process 1.8 GPS, which is a big improvement over the older device.

The delivery time was really fast. With the help of the reseller, we got the device in less than three days.  

As a replacement for an old solution in the office, we were not expecting big improvements with the firewall. However, we had noticed an improvement while we added rules into the system. The new GUI is really nice and easy to use.

We are now able to use infrastructure as a code and add the firewall into the pipeline with terraform as a controller and everything works really well. 

The API is handy and we are now testing how we can add rules via code. Also, the GUI is easy to use.

The Terraform module for Check Point is complete and really useful for managing the firewall.

Mail filtering is a really good feature that we are implementing for scam protection. 

The graphic interface is really easy to use and easy to teach to other members of the team.

The online documentation is complete and easy to read and understand.

The 3-year warranty offered is nice to have with no extra costs needed from us.

The exterior of the physical device can be improved with the use of a display and not just simple lights.

All the physical devices located in the rack are similar, Just a box with some small lights that does not provide too much information. 

For. me as a final user I will be happy if I can get a display that can show the error code when is a failure and not a simple  red led (This is the common practice). 

I just want more information when I'm on front the device. i know always can walk to my desk and check the GUI with the documentation and the information required. 

I've used the solution for three months now.

I have not had any issues since the moment of installation.

Users get a really nice performance in the order of 2.5 GPS.

Technical support is excellent. I do not have any complaints.

Positive

Yes. We used to use a Cisco 2500 and a Fortinet 110C. 

The Check Point device is better and the speed is superior.

We got full support from the provider and the manufacturer.

The vendor did all the migration in just a couple of hours.

I'm not involved in finance. I can't speak to any ROI.

I was not involved in the pricing; I was only involved in the installation and use it regularly.

The provider offers us the device in three days with the support to import the existing rules and make the migration. We didn't evaluate anything else. 

I really love the device and would choose it over the Cisco and the Fortinet 110C.

Our network security is based heavily on Check Point products. We secure our Internet gateway with Check Point. We also secure our production and other very important systems and solution that are mission-critical with Check Point NGFW. For an extra layer of security, we heavily use Check Point Identity Awareness to make Client IP-based rules obsolete. We control the access via dedicated Active Directory Security to groups. These user groups are used instead of IP Client Subnet ranges, increasing our security.

The Check Point Management makes troubleshooting and log analytics very comfortable. Our Engineers only need a few seconds to see if a connection is dropped or allowed, et cetera. This makes fulfilling these standard tasks easy for the operation team. The easy ruleset management helps us not lose the overview over the Check Point Firewall (NGFW) rulesets in daily operation. Good security should always be simple and clean and this product helps to make our environment more secure against any attacks from the outside.

We are using the classic firewalling, the Intrusion Preventions System (IPS) and we also use Check Point Identity Awareness. The most useful feature is for sure the classic firewalling, however, we could get this feature also from other vendors. The most valuable feature is the highly integrated NGFW features such as the IPS or Check Point Identity Awareness, which makes Check Point the best choice on the market. They have been leading the market for 20 years. This is deserved, in our opinion.

Check Point, of course, has flaws. As a Check Point Engineer, you must also be a Junior Linux Engineer as many things are happening on the command line in daily operation and almost all the time during troubleshooting. This makes learning Check Point a little bit harder than other firewall brands. The licensing was always a pain and is still a pain to deal with. 

For the next release, we would like to have better ruleset cleanup tools that are already included. It would make security management tools obsolete.

We've used Check Point for almost ten years.