Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) Reviews

I am using this solution for perimeter security in the company. Our firewall security is centralized under one management. Also, we use this firewall to manage some of the VPN clients and the employees' access across the company. 

Each firewall is capable of using the VPN client, but we only use two. We have five in total, but we only use two for these issues.

I am using the firmware version for the operating system. The blades are firewalled for IPS and mobile access.

Last year, we used the Check Point Identity Awareness Software Blade. Now, we only use a normal firewall with IP address rules, address destination, and services. Then, we can filter by users. So, my boss has access to these things by user. Even if it's connected with the Active Directory, we can filter by user name, or in this case by server name, and it works perfectly. This is very valuable for our company.

The most valuable features about Check Point are the API and automation process.

Using the GUI, you can add comments from your PC or the client server. If I want to check the firewall rules, I can send one line of command to determine if it is configured or not. 

Its implementation and integration with the rest of the network are better than its competitors.

The stability needs improvement for its version releases. They have a feature called Inline Layer as part of the R80.10 release. In the last version, it still had bugs and is not working very well. I would like the developers to release a version that is more stable, because if you start to use the latest release and try to use this newest feature, I'm not 100 percent sure that it will work very well. After six months of development, it might start working better. However, at the beginning, it's not a good choice to implement in your company with your first attempt. But one or two releases later, it might be better. 

If you only have one vendor and they are downgraded or no longer a leader in their industry, then you need to change the entire solution, making it more expensive. For example, Check Point's components are not interchangeable with other vendors.

Around four years.

The stability of the firewall is nice if you use the legacy mode, because the new mode is not good. Things worked in version 77, which is older. It was more stable. When they jumped from version 77 to 88, sometimes things didn't work that used to work in the earlier version.

The scalability of the firewall depends on the model. In terms of the implementation, it's really easy.

We have about 25 users for the entire solution. We have two engineers who work on deployments and implementation. We have another 18 engineers who do support and operations. They have responsibility to monitor the firewall 24/7.

It protects the core network and ISP: the routing, switching, and APM backbone. This is around 8,000 pieces of equipment. 

We don't have plans to increase our usage right now.

I would rate the technical support as a seven out of 10. Sometimes, it's difficult to get them to understand what the issue is. Sometimes, the issue is not resolved, then we solve it by ourselves with Check Point's documentation, which can be useful. When you open a case with Check Point, they can be a little slow. Sometimes, they don't solve things.

In the beginning, we used Fortinet, Juniper, and Cisco. Now, we only use Check Point for firewalls. 

Last year, we changed the Fortinet firewall to the Check Point firewall. The Check Point API let me make 100 net rules in just 10 minutes, which saved us time.

The administration is awful in Fortinet. They have the FortiGate portal on an HTTP portal. Therefore, if you want to make a change, you can make a change. But if you do the change, then it's directly applied on the network, and we don't want to do that. We configure and change the policy and routing. We only apply the changes in the night. However, with Fortinet, you need to configure and apply the changes at the same time. So, it's not useful for our operations.

With Fortinet, you need to duplicate the rules from the DMZ to the Internet and the Internet to the DMZ. In Check Point, you only use one rule, which works on both sites.

The initial setup is really easy. You can do it in 30 minutes. Setting up an environment for a firewall and its management with a licensed demo took me an hour last week, and that includes the time for configuring the rules. The whole installation is 30 minutes and the configuration is another 30 minutes.

If you are implementing from another vendor, Check Point has a program called SmartMove. Then, all you need is the configuration of the previous firewall. Once you do some optimization, then you are ready for the integration. This might take a month overall.

We consulted with one partner of Check Point, who is our provider. If the issue is really big, then we open a case with Check Point directly via the partner. My experience with them was really nice. It was the best experience that I had ever had.

They have amazing engineers. Their expertise is unbelievable. They do integrations really well. They could improve on routing and networking, but the product is what is important for me. 

The firewall is only for protection. It is not used to sell services.

The pricing and licensing are expensive. If you compare it with Fortinet, then it is cheaper on a yearly basis. However, Check Point is the most expensive firewall right now in terms of licenses and its appliance. My recommendation is if you want a long-term investment, then you should use an open server. If you use an open server, then the latency is really low. If you pay for a full appliance, it's more expensive.

Check Point's web administration is not complete. If you compare it to Fortinet's web administration, Check Point's web administration is not nice. However, Check Point's full solution, including SmartConsole, is better than Fortinet's solution.

If you use Apple computers or Linux, the product may not be a good choice for you.

I would rate the solution as a seven point eight out of 10. They can improve some things. They can make it more flexible in terms of its software. It is a good solution, and I like it. For me, it's the best firewall solution.

I have been using this solution since the GAIA OS R77 was there. I am using it for my day to day access such as policy creation, policy modification, and also regularly policy disabling and deletion. I have 17K+ users in my organization, 100 + client to site VPN and I have a number of S2S as well. My daily job is health checkup, security log monitoring and incident management, daily IPS checks, threat presentation reports and to analyze the risk and take necessary action on that as well.

It secures my organization. With the application blade, I can make security as application based and the custom application is also very useful. With identity awareness blades we get insights on our local users who are accessing/passing through the respective rule as users.  We also use the DLP, IPS, and VPN features. We have multiple site to sites with our clients and it is very easy to configure and manage.

IPS helps with security against upcoming and unknown threats and activities. We regularly check the report and as per daily report we will check the risk and prevent each alert that is critical based on our business requirement and make it secure.

IPSec VPN is also our key feature as our organization having widely customer across globe so it is very good feature to us to connect and run our business with them very smoothly and softly. 

The unknown category has been a pain point. We cannot understand this category and the Check Point engineers are also stuck with it. If we enable HTTPS inspection then without this category my URL will stop working. This has a huge impact on my business. We are still running without HTTPS inspection even in a monitoring mode.

Our SAM rule is also not working to block the IP address which we don't allow in our organization so we have to create a traditional rule base block which is a time-consuming job for me and my team.

I am using this solution for four years.

This is widely scalable solution.

I would say not much exp and not lower, average technical support. We are struggling in most of the cases.

Very easy.

In-house team and technical support team.

I would say it's complete ROI for us.

Setup is easy, in my short tenure I have done multiple migrations and have set up our new organization. For cost and pricing, I don't have an idea.

This is a very good and best solution as a perimeter device for NGFW.

It is a typical firewall that has been implemented in most of our regions. We use it for normal firewall policies and VPNs.

We are mainly using Check Point firewalls. We also have a few Check Point cloud security programs.

Everything can be managed from a single dashboard nowadays.

Since we upgraded to R.80 from our previous R.77 version, the activity of my team has improved a lot. We don't have to open multiple consoles or go to multiple nodes. Even though we are managing multiple solutions of Check Point, they feel similar to us now.

The most valuable feature is the Check Point Management Server, especially version R.80 onward. We can manage everything. We have endpoint security, cloud security, and email security. Everything can be managed from a single management server, making this a very unique and easy solution to use in the market now.

From a technical perspective, it is an easy solution to use. Everything seems perfect. We are not using all of its features, like sandboxing. 

The main thing for a normal operations guy who is creating tools and firewalls, it is quite difficult to manage. It requires an expert level of knowledge in Check Point products to manage these scalable platform appliances and the virtual firewall that comes with it. We have to educate our guys and give them training on a regular basis to work on these products. Otherwise, it's fine.

About five years.

It is pretty stable. It hasn't caused many issues over the years, unlike normal network issues. They do release bug fixes at least once a month. We keep very good track of that and update the patches regularly, but we haven't run into bigger issues so far. So, I'd say it is quite stable. 

The firewall is very easy to use and hasn't caused much trouble for us over the years.

From a scalability perspective, they have a solutions like Check Point Maestro. Therefore, it is easy to upscale nowadays.

We have over 200,000 end users.

They should improve the support a bit. Though they have expert engineers in tech, sometimes the amount of time to get back a solution for an issue is more than what is acceptable, even though it is a high priority.

During a scheduled activity or an implementation, they find their highest level of support. During an implementation, I never faced an issue with the support. I would rate them a nine out of ten for this.

The company has been using Check Point firewalls for the past 10 years. Before that, they used Cisco ASA.

Mostly, I have worked on Check Point products. Therefore, the initial setup was straightforward. It was not that complicated. 

I can spin up a firewall and put it in production within an hour. If it's a migration from a different solution or upgrading an existing management solution, it might take some time because of the planning. There are a lot of things that have to be a part of the implementation or migration activities.

We do it ourselves most of the time. We only take help when it comes to scalable platforms, like big chassis firewalls, which are little complicated. Then, we get outside help.

I manage the operations team and have also been involved as a consultant.

We have some best practices in place that we follow.

There are four security engineers who deploy and maintain this solution.

Comparatively, Check Point pricing is a little high. However, if you have that budget, I would recommend anybody to go with Check Point.

For cloud security purposes, we looked at FortiGate. In the end, we decided to go with Check Point. Primarily, we went with Check Point because of the fee. We also already had expertise on Check Point and the team is comfortable around it. We like that Check Point has a single dashboard. Feedback from peers suggests that the support in India for NGFWs is not as good with other vendors as it is at Check Point.

Get a team who has expertise on this product and educate your team. Give them training. If Check Point is using a new version, make sure your team is aware of that. If there are any changes, let them know and make them comfortable working around this product because we have had some issues due to lack of expertise.

If you don't have an expert in-house team for implementation, I would strongly recommend getting help of the Check Point professional services team. There are a few third-party operational services, but I would go with Check Point professional services.

We are planning to increase our usage of the solution. Every project that we take on has Check Point security products as part of the solution.

I would give this solution an eight out of 10 because of the support. They take too much time when they should give you a result.

We have around 500 firewalls all around the world with a global team to manage them. We are using Check Point NGFW for Internet traffic, IPS, and UTM devices.

Atos provides this solution, including network design and advice.

• Antivirus
• IPS
  
• They got the logs into one site, which is wonderful.
• There is a secure action line code that you can announce your products in.
• If you have a number of sites, like a hundred sites around the world, you can deploy multiple VSX testing. 
• All over the world, you can have DMZs in data centers, e.g., in the USA, Dubai, and London. 
• It is easy to deploy and upgrade. 
• Easy to manage, e.g., if there is a new engineer onsite, they can easily manage it.

In a VPN setup, we have Internet connection via Check Point. The connectivity is not turnkey like competing devices. We have not yet terminated our site-to-site VPN because things are fluctuating right now and Check Point needs to be upgraded. Also, their troubleshooting needs to be improved for this. 

I have been using it for five years.

I haven't seen any stability issues, though I have seen some issues with the management of the gateway. Stability-wise, it is good (a nine out of 10).

We have 74 locations. We can have 10,000 users maximum via an Internet gateway. We have four data center across the world: two in USA, one in London, and one in Dubai. Passing through Check Point per location: in the USA - 5000 users, in London - 2000 users, and in Dubai - 10,000 users.

There are 12 network security engineers/consultants managing Check Point and the legacy firewall, SonicWall.

Right now, we cannot go directly to Check Point because of vendor dependency. We have to first initiate with our vendor.

We migrated SonicWall to Check Point about two years back. That took one year to set up in our organization. 

We switched away from SonicWall because it is a legacy firewall at end of life. SonicWall was missing features that Check Point has, like UTM, IDS, IPS, antivirus, etc. Check Point is better for protection and performance-wise.

It is easy to deploy or upgrade. There is no need to do this manually with commands. This solution can be set up online.

We have two devices. Right now, we are deploying and upgrading a new setup, where you can do management, management plus gateway on the device, or virtually you can install your management device on VMware or Hyper-V. With the Hyper-V and the Management Server, you can access all the gateways. For the Management Server and gateways, we have an activation key.

We are an IBM OEM company who received installation support from that vendor. They provided all the network connectivity.

For our implementation, we:

1. Started with an initial diagram of the configurations and what we want to see after the installation.
2. Segregated the SonicWall and Check Point tools for the migration since we used automation.
3. Checked the mode of installation. We went with transparent mode.
4. Collected the IPs for the firewall. It required multiple IPs because with we have cluster nodes.
5. Assessed the feasibility of Check Point in our environment.

For our strategy, we looked at:

• How many users are in all our offices? For example, is it a small office, mid-size office, or data center?
• Using high-end versus lower-end devices, e.g., lower-end devices means a smaller price tag.

A smaller office of less than 500 people would get a 4000 Series. Whereas, a larger office would get a 5600 or 7000 Series. We have to be focused on the natural topology.

We have had some vulnerabilities when we upgraded the R80.30 Management Server. We have some gateways right now in our R77.30 version, and this means if we go without license in R80.30, then it will prompt a bad connection and terminate. We have had some license difficulties with the connection going from R70 to R80. However, these don't largely impact performance.

We looked at Fortinet and Palo Alto. We did not feel FortiGate was capable of what we required. Palo Alto is somehow not as good as Check Point, budget-wise and performance-wise. Palo Alto is more costly than Check Point.

If you need a good support or something that is good budget-wise, then I recommend going with Check Point compared to Cisco or Palo Alto.

It is a good firewall. It has returned good performance. We are happy with the product. I would rate the product as a nine out of 10.

Check Point NGFW is being used as a security product in the environment. It is securing the IT infrastructure and delivering the services as expected. In the current world scenario, IT is becoming the backbone for every organization, and most business is highly dependant on IT so securing the IT infrastructure is becoming challenging. Check Point NGFW meets the expectations of our organization to secure the IT infrastructure as per organizational need. Check Point NGFW also gives many security features in single box which reduce your management complexities.

Our organization's primary need is to make information available and secure from an insider as well as outsider threats. Check Point NGFW can give you lots of security features on a single device that can be used as per the organization's need, you not need to procure separate security devices to strengthen the security. The organization also provides services like service providers so it becomes more critical to secure the IT environment and we believe Check Point NGFW family is meeting the requirement as per the expectation.

Advanced logging capabilities: Check Point generates extensive logs which may be very useful to figure out the issues. Its logs also contain too much information which can be used to modify the policy as per user need and organizational security environment. The same can be used to figure out probable attack surface or necessary steps for mitigation. 

Anti-spoofing security feature: Check Point has inbuilt by default enabled feature of anti-spoofing which reduces the attack surface from the spoofed IP addresses. 

IPS: Check Point IPS is one of the best products in the market.  

Management: Check Point should move away from its current architecture wherein it mandatorily requires a management server to manage the gateways. They should develop A feature in the gateway itself so that no management server is needed for policy and gateway management. They should leave it to the user whether they want to procure a dedicated management server or run the show with the gateway itself. It will also reduce the operation cost.

They should also optimize the packet mode feature like Cisco’s firewall packet tracer wherein it tells administrators which policy or rule is processing the intended traffic.

More than two years.

Check Point maestro is highly scalable, their other chassis base solutions are also scalable 

If you choose Check Point maestro platform they you need not to worry about the scalability.

They are very cooperative and supportive in nature. 

We were using an ACL based firewall which was traditional and not meets the current security expectation. So to meet the advance security requirement product like Check Point is needed.

It was straightforward.

Check Point authorised partner had been involved in the migration to avoid any operation issue 

Hard to calculate.

They should first understand their organization's needs and accordingly choose the product. In case if someone is not sure especially about sizing then they should use the Check Point maestro platform as it gives you the flexibility to augment the capacity on the fly without disrupting the existing running operation.

We have not evaluated any other option before Check Point. 

Check Point gives you flexibility and eases the management with meeting organisation’s security need. But before choosing proper sizing has to be done.

*Perimeter Firewalls - to protect regional hubs and local offices from public space and provide L3-L7 filtering

*Internal Segmentation Firewalls - to secure company's internal network from movement of malicious actors and reduce traffic flows only to authorised ones

*Public and Private Cloud - to secure hybrid environment either onprem or in the cloud while achieving micro segmentation per host

*Cloud Compliance - to get a visibility into cloud environment and and related vulnerabilities 

*Data Center

*SaaS

Check Point is able to satisfy almost any security tool for enterprise clients. This allows us to deploy complex changes from a single management interface, get better visibility, and significantly reduce operational complexity.

I have to emphasize the value of Diamond support here where most senior engineers can provide great support with any challenges. Thinking out of the box, sense of responsibility, professionalism and much more - such an attitude helps to provide resolution to any crisis in the shortest term

With the new capabilities embedded into R80.XX flavor it is possible to achieve great flexibility while defining your security policy. It is possible to utilize a variety of objects to define static or dynamic criteria for inspection and reduce general rule base size and complexity, while not giving up on security

The security research team is doing a great job staying on top of ongoing threats and releasing fixes for ongoing attacks within days or sometimes hours.

Check Point always actively listens to its customers trying to identify emerging needs and satisfy them pro-actively

I would like to see an improvement of built-in monitoring capabilities such as throughput. Practically visualization of CPview outputs into beautiful pink GUI will do it. 

The monitoring of scalable solutions is quite tricky, but it could be relevant for all vendors who possess the same technology.

IPS fine-tuning may require some time to understand the interrelation between IPS protections, core Protections and other IPS profile elements. But in general, Check Point is on the way of great simplification of TP management

Check Point products are being in use for the last 6 years.

The firewall is the primary use case of this solution & IPS is secondary use case of the solutions.

We are looking forward to Sandblast solutions.

We also use it for cloud expansions 

The Check Point NGFWs brought up the security level with the help of the advanced software blades - we use Application Control, URL Filtering, IPS, Anti-Bot, and Antivirus. The setup was simple, and the performance is great - we have significant resources to expand the environment in the future without disabling any blades and thus maintaining the security on the same, high level.

It has improved the security posture of the organization by implementing this solution.

Now we can add application signature in the same rule base & don't have to create a different policy for that.

Advanced networking and routing features - we use Proxy ARP to announced virtual IPs to ISP and bing domain names to it; BGP for dynamic routing over IPSec VPN tunnels to other environments, and Policy-Based Routing for connecting to two ISPs.

• Easiness while working on all blade of firewalls 
• Flexibility in NAT rules 
• The new Policy Layers feature for building up the Access Control policy - the rules are now more understandable and efficient.
• Also, even so, the new SmartConsole is declared to be unified starting from version R80.10, there are still some features that have to be configured in the old SmartDashboard (e.g. Mobile Access policy and Antivirus), or on the Gaia OS level (all the routing features).
  

• Offline Sandblast solution, which should send malicious sources to other security solutions.
  
• TAC Support level to be enhanced 
• More details to be included while VPN troubleshooting, using GUI representation 
• Integrate all blades to use a single policy rather than multiple.

I have been using Check Point for more than 14 years.

We are using Palo Alto and Check together.

Cost is negotiable always & matches the expectations and licences are flexible and are added advantage. 

We evaluated other solutions.

Our company works in developing and delivering online gambling platforms. The Check Point NGFWs are the core security solution we use to protect our DataCenter environment located in Asia (Taiwan). The environment has about ~50 physical servers as virtualization hosts, and we have two HA Clusters consist of 2x5400 hardware appliances, managed by an OpenServer Security Management Server on a Virtual Machine (KVM), all running on R80.10 with the latest JumboHotfix. The Clusters serve as firewalls for both inter-VLAN and external traffic.

The overall security of the environment has been greatly improved by the Check Point NGFWs. Before implementing this solution we have to rely on the Cisco ACLs and Zone-Based firewall that we had configured on switches and routers, which in fact a simple stateful firewall, and currently not an efficient for protecting from advanced threats. The Check Point NGFWs brought up the security level with the help of the advanced software blades - we use Application Control, URL Filtering, IPS, Anti-Bot, and Antivirus. The setup was simple, and the performance is great - we have significant resources to expand the environment in the future without disabling any blades and thus maintaining the security on the same, high level.

1. Advanced logging capabilities - our support team on duty constantly monitors the security logs in the SmartConsole, and notifies the security team in case of major alerts.

2. Advanced networking and routing features - we use Proxy ARP to announced virtual IPs to ISP and bing domain names to it; BGP for dynamic routing over IPSec VPN tunnels to other environments, and Policy-Based Routing for connecting to two ISPs.

3. The new Policy Layers feature for building up the Access Control policy - the rules are now more understandable and efficient.

The pricing for the Check Point products should be reconsidered - we found it to be quite expensive to purchase and to maintain (the licenses and the support services need to be prolonged regularly). 

We also had several support cases opened for software issues (e.g. unstable BGP sessions over VPN tunnels), which, in our opinion, took too long to resolve - up to one month.

Also, even so, the new SmartConsole is declared to be unified starting from version R80.10, there are still some features that have to be configured in the old SmartDashboard (e.g. Mobile Access policy and Antivirus), or on the Gaia OS level (all the routing features).

We have been using the Check Point Next-Generation Firewalls for about 3 years, starting from late 2017.

In general, the solution is stable, but we still have had some support cases opened and have to install the JumboHotfixes on a regular basis to fix the minor bugs. Please note that the current version of the software we use - R80.10 - is not the latest one (R80.40).

The solution is scalable - we use the Active-Standby Clusters, but could switch to Active-Active and add additional Gateway nodes if needed.

We have had several support cases opened. Some of the were resolved by installing the latest recommended JumoHotfix, some required additional configuration on OS kernel level (e.g. TCP MSS clamping). The longest issue took about one month to be resolved, which we consider too long.

We relied on the ACLs and Zone-Based firewalls of the Cisco switches and firewalls, which doesn't provide sufficient security protection against the modern advanced threats. 

The equipment has been delivered on time, without delays. The setup was straightforward. The configuration was easy and understandable. 

In-house team - we have a Check Point Certified engineer.

Use the Check Point Performance Sizing Utility to measure and estimate the hardware needed to purchase for your environment.