Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) Reviews

As a next-generation firewall, this product is capable of handling all kinds of threats that might try to attack the network, including events such as DDoS attacks. 

The compliance part of the product has been very useful to our organization. There are many useful reports from this firewall device. For example, it can tell us how much of our network has compliance with the guidelines that are in place.

The product is very easy to use.

It's quite a stable solution.

The scalability is very good.

The solution is easy to install and deploy.

The product could always be even more stable and secure, as it would improve protection.

As we aren't using the very latest iteration, it's hard to say which features are lacking, as some might have been added in the latest releases we haven't yet migrated over to.

The pricing could always be more competitive.

Technical support needs to be more helpful.

I've been using the solution for the last six months or so. It's been less than a year, and therefore, it hasn't been that long. 

The stability is good. There are no bugs and glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution offers good scalability. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. It's not hard.

We have 50 users on the solution right now.

I would say that technical support could be better. We also use Cisco, and, in comparison, Cisco's support is way better in terms of how helpful and responsive they are. We aren't as satisfied with Check Point. They need to be faster, friendlier, and much more knowledgeable. 

Right now I am using Check Point and Cisco ASA.

The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult. It's pretty straightforward.

The deployment doesn't take long either. It's a fast process.

You only really need two people for deployment and maintenance for most setups.

I handled the implementation myself. I did not need the assistance of an integrator or consultant. 

The solution could work to make the pricing a bit lower. It's similar in cost to Palo Alto, however, if it was lower, it would make them more competitive. 

We are a customer and an end-user. We don't have a business relationship with Check Point. 

We are not using the latest version of the solution, however, I cannot speak to the actual version number. We might be a version or two behind the latest update.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've largely been quite pleased with its capabilities.

I would recommend the solution to other users and companies. 

The next-generation firewalls are used on the perimeter within a couple of data centers. There are lots of firewalls and we are trying to consolidate everything in the final solution. The MDS and VSX are real solutions that are easing the consolidation across different domains to make management easier. It also improves the overall solution from the operations perspective where BAU teams can leverage different Check Point product lines, like Smart Log, to support customers on a daily basis.

There is a lot of legacy traffic from other vendors that has been migrated to Check Point which has resulted in a lot of stability in our environment. Moreover, consolidation happening across different legacy environments is being enhanced by the usage of MDS and VSX solutions offered by Check Point. This is making things easier from both a migration and implementation perspective. It offers easy management architecture, and, with Smart Log, makes life easier for the operations engineers and different teams working with Check Point products.

The most valuable feature of Check Point is the Centralized Management (MDS) and Virtualization (VSX) for the firewalls. Using these features provides enhanced security with reduced cost across different domains and tenants with complete segregation from the policies database and a user traffic perspective. Using these features is proving to be scalable as things are virtualized and the resources can be increased or decreased as per the demand or usage from a project perspective.

The product or services can be improved from the cost and the pricing perspective. There are a lot of other competitors in the market providing similar solutions with more low-cost options. There is no doubt that the great three-tier architecture of Check Point is great, however, when the cost is considered, it proves to be a bit expensive as compared to other products in the market. Also, the licensing and maintenance costs are quite high. Maintaining these solutions proves to be a bit costly to organizations from a day-to-day perspective.

I've used the solution for five years.

The stability is excellent.

The scalability is really good.

We are satisfied with the level of support.

Yes, we have used a different solution previously and have switched because of the great performance that Check Point offers.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Yes, and we had a good experience.

The ROI meets our expectations.

The cost is quite high for Check Point products.

Yes, however, I prefer not to say which.

Overall, the solution and product line are good but more competitive pricing can be offered.

On-premises

We use Check Point for VPN access for all employees, as a rule. We also used it as a filter, a firewall, and it's the front line of our access to the Internet.

It has VPN access for our employees and it controls access, barring intrusion for non-authorized access.

The URL filter is activated to filter access to our employees. We use filtering for VPN access.

The configuration is one of the best features of this product.

When this product was purchased approximately 12 years ago it was the top of the line.

The product has been working very well.

I don't have any issues with the software of this solution. It works as is expected.

I would like to see more integration with other infrastructures. We are considering Cisco because it is more integrated, and the network limits of the solution are better.

Recently, we experience a problem with the hardware because it was too old, it was blocked. The hardware failed, but the software did not. With older hardware, it is a problem because our network is growing every year. The solution is not at maximum performance. 

It does not have the performance that we require. The network is not the same as it was 12 years ago. There are several logs.

We are looking for a cheaper product that is more integrated than our Cisco Network appliance.

It may also need to support other types of architecture.

The only reasons we are looking at other solutions are price and integration.

Check Point was installed in the company approximately 12 years ago.

The stability is good.

We are a company with 1,200 employees, and approximately 700 are using this solution.

We have five HP Servers, and we have a cluster in different geographic locations. 

Check Point has been installed in an HP-certified server. It is not an appliance, it is an HP Server.

We have one or two professionals who work on the platform.

It is not a cheap solution, which is why we are looking for another one.

We are currently evaluating new firewall solutions because the Check Point that we have was installed approximately 12 years ago, and wanted to change to a next-generation firewall.

The HP Server works fine without any maintenance, but it needs to be taken care of. We did not, which caused a disk to fail. We have one or maybe two that are working. I don't have any complaints about the HP Server. It was sized for that network load at that time.

I would rate Check Point a ten out of ten. It works as expected.

On-premises

It's our main firewall and the first line of protection from the outside! We use it to interconnect our remote locations (that use different vendors and equipment) and let the employees work remotely.

We're a small site with 300 users and this equipment is more than enough for us. We use almost all the blades and the equipment has run smoothly for years.

This NGFW monitors all the traffic outside of the main network, prevents malicious activities, and lets us easily manage network policies to shape our connections.

Stability and security are the best way to describe this solution. The attacks from the outside still exist, but now we're better protected. We can view everything that goes in and out of our network with all the information in one place. The drill-down is very helpful and easy to use. Currently, we can troubleshoot connection problems live and solve them in a couple of minutes. This is an improvement on the 1-2 hours with the old solution.

In 4 years we've only had one problem with the equipment (due to a malfunctioning UPS). That corrupted the boot of the equipment, but was easily solved with an fsck.

We basically use almost all the blades, since the IPS, Threat Emulation, Spam, etc., are essential for our work. However, currently, Mobile Access is the most valuable. The stability of the solution and the security it gives when working remotely is great. It lets our employees work from everywhere, anytime!

The AntiSpam/Mail blade was also one of the main reasons we went with this product since we hosted our email server locally. This was an extra layer of protection on top of the existing solution.

Threat and Application control are also very important to us.

I do prefer to manage everything from only one point of entry/one application. Some things can only be configured from the smart console and others from the smart dashboard. This is the only handicap in this solution. It would be ideal to manage everything from one central place.

Instead of using a windows application to manage the equipment, it would be better to use a web app to configure the solution from a browser.  I know that it's not as powerful (you can't do everything from there), but then we could manage the solution and troubleshoot from any device.

It's faster to see the event logs on a webpage than it is to see them in the smart console.

I've used the solution for 4 years.

It's very stable. It's also the main reason I love the solution.

During this time i never had to manually restart the equipment because of connectivity problems or because of CPU/memory degradation performance. Sometimes these values get high, but i never lose Throughtput, the equipment continues to run smoothly. We used to restart our older firewall at least 2 times per month.

In the beginning, because we use the spam blade, the memory usage was always high, and the administration was a little bit slow. But Checkpoint provided us an extra memory upgrade and after that we never had administration problems. If we don't have internet connection it's allways the ISP, it was never because of the firewall.

Although I only have one unit, I know that it scales perfectly.

We only had one problem with this equipment. That was because it couldn't boot properly due to disk corruption (malfunction UPS), however, searching the technical Check Point forums it was easy to find a solution to the problem at hand.

We managed to solve the problem without contacting customer service at all.

We used to have Zyxel products, but they were aging and couldn't let us connect at faster speeds.

The setup was easy. It didn't take long to have it up and running.

The only concern for us was the remote sites - since it was different vendors. However, we had everything documented and prepared and due to that, it went flawlessly.

It was also easy to create access policies.

The implementation was through a vendor, and the installation went really well. The consultant was Check Point certified and explained everything in detail.

Later on, we added new remote sites to the configuration (in-house) without any problem. We didn't need to check with the vendor.

It's not easy to calculate, however, given the stability and security of the solution, it's elevated. There are no bulletproof solutions. That said, now we can rest a bit more because our assets are more protected than they were a couple of years ago.

The setup cost, pricing, and licensing can be a bit expensive, but, I promise, it's completely worth the cost.

I evaluated Fortinet and Check Point.

It simply works like a charm. The stability and trust in the vendor are also very important to us.

On-premises

The primary use of the solution is as an enterprise perimeter firewall in our data centers. We also use software blades for IPS/IDS functions as well. We have a combination of enterprise-grade firewalls like the 15000 and16000 series as well as mid-size versions like the 5000 and 6000 series which are for specific segment isolation or other purposes. The software blades are running on HP servers. Management is done via 5150 appliances. 5000 and 6000 series appliances are primarily used for segment isolation while the larger appliances are used for perimeter security.

We have been using Check Point firewalls as our main security devices for many years and thus have a strong level of expertise within the organization on implementing various features. We love the reliability and strong feature set of the firewall appliances and software blades. Managing policies with v80 and above is also much more streamlined. Troubleshooting events via logs makes identifying issues straightforward. We have multiple engineers working on policies at the same time, so the newer versions help simplify this tasks for us.

I love the redesigned interface starting with R80 as well as the ability for multiple engineers to work on the policy simultaneously. Policy management is simplified and the virtualization options help us to plan for future deployments in a much easier way. While we haven't tried out all the features available - like Sandblast, AntiBot, URL filtering, etc. - the fact that these are available to use is definitely a plus. We were able to use the IPS features, negating the deployment of an expensive standalone IPS solution.

Check Point solutions have always been more complex to deploy than their competitors. There may be multiple scenarios where we may need to engage support, however, the customer support is very good. There are certain features that are only possible from the command line (e.g. packet captures) and it would be good to integrate everything into the GUI to reduce the learning curve for newer engineers. Finally, it can be a costlier solution - especially for the smaller firewalls as compared to the competition. It would be beneficial to have more training options or documentation as well.

I've been using the solution for over 15 years.

The solution is extremely stable. There have been a few software bugs that have caused some unwanted glitches but these were fixed with updates.

If the product is sized correctly in terms of appliances, then it is easy to scale. 

The support is excellent and knowledgeable. The service offered sets them apart from the competition.

We have used Juniper SSG firewalls in the past and moved to Check Point due to the learning curve on the new JunOS deployments with the SRX firewalls.

The setup required some planning and was slightly complex. The process requires good expertise on the product before deployment.

We had an in-house team for deployment with active support from Check Point.

I don't have much detail on this.

We evaluated Cisco ASA firewalls and Palo Alto devices as well as Juniper SRXs.

Setup can be complex and it is very helpful to first plan the deployment before rushing into it. Use the support available to find out the best options to use.

We would love to have more training materials and/or courses available so that I can onboard engineers in a faster way.

On-premises

We use this solution for permissions regarding access ports and services. We also use Check Point Remote Access VPN as an endpoint VPN. We use it for site-to-site configuration. 

All of the traffic that comes through our sites passes through our firewall. Basically, everyone, including our staff and clients, passes through our firewall. In other words, we have thousands of users using this solution.

The NGFW has helped our compliance to regulations authorities such as PCIDSS. It has has helped the bank create secure connections to vendors and third party service providers as well as remain stay protected from attacks and intrusion attempts.

The management of services, including forming access lists with the services we have, connecting servers to servers, permissions between servers and users — this is all great. In addition, Check Point has a really cool GUI.

The end-user VPN could be improved. It could benefit from some modification. 

The VPN timeout feature needs to be improved. When we try to connect to the VPN, it times out before we can even enter our user name and password. If you can't prove you are who you say you are within seven to ten seconds, it just kicks you out.

1 year +

Check Point has actually failed twice within the last year. The first failure was a disk failure. Check Point offers a software solution, they don't actually offer hardware. They will only provide you with the software and licenses. Because of this, when our disk failed, we had to wait for them to ship in some new hardware for us to fix the issue.

Aside from the disk failure issue, a month ago, our Check Point device froze. We don't exactly know what caused it to happen. It caused the entire organization to go down for about two to three hours until we found out that Check Point was not allowing anything to pass through. Our Check Point is clustered, so primarily it's supposed to have a failover feature. For some reason, the failover feature didn't work. When the primary gateway went down, it affected everyone.

We've not tried to expand Check Point. We have two sites. We have a primary site and a secondary site that is off-prem. For this reason, we planned big. We planned for a high amount of availability for our two sites. We use clusters of four gateways: two gateways are in one cluster, and another two gateways are in another cluster. If one goes down, it switches to the other. If the second goes down, it switches to the other DR site. We've got backups of everything. 

The technical support is very responsive. We have a vendor that acts as a buffer between us and Check Point. In our country, these companies all have a local vendor that pushes their product.

When we contacted our vendor, our vendor called Check Point and as they were talking, Check Point shipped the hard disk, to fix the issue I mentioned earlier. They just placed the order immediately, while we were still talking. We think that they knew that delivery was going to take about five days — it was actually very fast.

The initial setup and deployment were straightforward. We deployed it with RADIUS servers;  it was not complex at all.

From scratch to finish, deployment took about a month. It took this long because we had to convert all of our existing configurations from Cisco Firewall to Check Point. We had to get help from our vendor to do this. He had to manually convert each and every command from our existing Cisco device to Check Point — that took a while. This was the main reason that deployment took so much time.

The end-user VPN didn't take much time to deploy. Neither did the site-connecting with the VPN — that took a day or two to deploy.

I think our licensing is on a yearly basis, but it could be every three years. Either way, it's not more than three years — that I am certain of.  

The pricing was actually what made us go for Check Point. Palo Alto was much more expensive. Check Point offers the same applications and features as Palo Alto for roughly a third of the price.

We evaluated Palo Alto, Cisco (which we were using), and we also evaluated Check Point — which we ended up with.

I would recommend Check Point to others. We are still learning as we're just about a year into using it, but so far, the support and the solution in general has been good. I'd recommend Check Point, especially to users that are looking for an affordable solution. 

Check Point also has a great community. They have this community where users can go to share ideas. They also have great networks. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight. Cisco dominated the African market until Check Point came along. 

On-premises

We use this product for providing perimeter security, as well as advanced threat protection capabilities to critical infrastructure. The solution is expected to deliver high-performance throughput for voluminous traffic continuously. 

We are using these gateways for multiple functionalities such as:

• Perimeter Gateways
• Anti - APT (Advanced Persistent Threat)
• Anti Malware / Anti Virus
• SSL Inspection
• Network Intrusion Prevention System
• Private Threat Cloud

All of our solutions are expected to run in high availability and have good resiliency. 

Check Point NGFW is the first perimeter security solution used in our environment and it is able to deliver the expected results. Specifically, it supports high-performance throughput for voluminous traffic.

The vendor has proven capability of identifying known threats, which can be seen while managing the firewall. The OEM has identified a roadmap in line with the emerging threat landscape and evolves the product to counter these threats. 

The central management console has helped with segregation, where planned interventions with management consoles do not have any impact on production or critical business traffic.

Next-Generation Threat Prevention capabilities provide security in a high-traffic load, ensuring detection and prevention of known threats by AME, AV, and Sandblast technologies. 

We are also using the system to create VPN gateways for our multiple partners and we haven't faced any issues with them.

 Check Point gateways are a stable product that can run without any issues until a major upgrade or vulnerability mitigation is required.

The support has been reasonable and they were able to minimize the impact during critical incidents.

There is a scope of improvement in detecting zero-day threats using the SandBlast technology, by introducing emulation of Linux-based operating systems. We have also observed issues while using the products with SSL decryption.

There is room for improvement in application-based filtering, as with other firewalls available in the market today. Check Point has improved its application filtering capabilities in the recent past and their latest version, R80, is more capable but still, creating an application-based filter policy is a little cumbersome. 

We have been using the Check Point NGFW for the past four years.

This solution is very much stable and does not require frequent changes in architecture. The patch frequency is limited, which reduces the downtime requirements.

This NGFW is very much scalable; however, I am not sure about other components such as PTC, etc.

Technical support is a mixed experience. Most of the time, issues are handled well in a timely manner but some issues have lingered for a very long time, causing multiple iterations.

We did not use another similar solution prior to this one.

As we use a lot of components from Check Point, the setup was a little complex in terms of deployment and traffic handling.

We had assistance from the vendor's professional services team to ensure smooth deployment. It was a green field project so the deployment was easy. The team deployed on implementation had expertise with the solution.

The ROI for security is the confidence that the solution is able to deliver the expected outcome. This includes stability, Threat Prevention capabilities, Granular policies, etc.

Licensing is pretty straightforward and is based on the blades available, such as NGFW, NGTP, and NGTX. Generally speaking, the pricing is in line with other players in the industry.

We evaluated products by Fortinet and Palo Alto.

In summary, this is a good solution that is stable, and I recommend it.

On-premises

Our primary use case is as a perimeter firewall for main and DR sites for a financial institution. It secures Internet access for users through IPS/AV/Threat Emulation/Application control and URL filtering with HTTPS inspection and geolocation restrictions. 

It secures our email and MDM solutions. 

We also use it to create site-to-site VPNs with vendors. Remote access is achieved through the use of a secure workspace and SSL network extender. Securing and inspecting HTTP traffic to our web servers is another important task. 

It secures several DMZs and segregates them from the rest of the network.

We use all of the security features available. 

It has helped us with controlling internet access, securing our external websites, and providing remote access that you can trust (secure workspace). The latter provides with a virtual Windows 7 desktop that only allowed apps can be initiated from. In our case, we launch RDP sessions from secure workspace. 

The latest version of the software is a big win overall, with major improvements in how the rulebase is scanned (it's not the top down classical rulebase checking, but a column based checking) and overall efficiency.

Remote access with a secure workspace provides a clear separation between the client and corporate network. 

Threat Emulation (sandboxing) is great for zero-day malware and it is easy to configure. 

Logging and administration are best-of-breed. You can quickly trace back on all sorts of logs in no time. 

IPS and AV rules are granular and specific for the rules that you need. 

The geolocation feature is good for dropping irrelevant traffic. 

Configuration through SMS is quick and easy. It eliminates administration errors while checking consistency before applying a policy.

I would like to have an improved secure workspace solution for remote access. I hear that the Apache Guacamole solution has been integrated into R81. 

The site-to-site VPN options are numerous, but they can get confusing. Interoperability with other vendors is not the strongest when it comes to setting up VPNs. It's totally different from any other VPN vendors I have come across. 

Improvements are needed in policy backups and reverting to the previous policy. This used to be better in R77.30. 

Policy installation tends to take a long time when the rule base increases in size, which can become frustrating. 

I have been using Check Point NGFW for 10 years.

We have never had any unexpected crashes or issues.

It should scale well as they now support more than 40 CPUs on a single system. 

Our experience has been great, although we don't have direct support. This means that sometimes, it takes a while to get to the bottom of issues.

Check Point is really the best NGFW I have come across and I have worked with many vendors including Cisco, Juniper, and FortiGate. It's a platform that a huge amount of research has gone into over the years. It has a great support community and clear guides to solve all sorts of problems and issues.

I didn't switch to Check Point, as it was always there. We haven't switched away from it over the past 10 years. 

We always need some help on installs or major upgrades. 

We have used several vendors and some are better than others. 

It is difficult to calculate ROI when it comes to security products. 

The hardware cost is not huge, but you need to push for good pricing on software licensing and blades.

Check Point was implemented in the company before I arrived. 

It's demanding for the administrator, as it takes years to get an in-depth knowledge of the platform. Otherwise, it is easy to use from day one.

On-premises