Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) Reviews

We use Check Point as well as Cisco. The firewall is used in order to continue filtering with VMware VMotion on different data centers. 

We have several data centers that are stretched. Our Check Point firewalls are used to filter north/south traffic.

With BGP on Gaia, when one of the clusters is unreacheable, the traffic is rerouted to another cluster. 

We also use VSX which is really a very good product for macrosegmentation.

The management of the firewall and advanced routing is great. It's easy to use and troubleshoot.

We need east/west Check Point firewalls in order to do micro-segmentation. A good solution for us is a solution that can be installed on différent systems (Linux, Windows K8S, bare metal, etc.) and can have centralized management.

Troubleshooting is also a big feature that will be necessary in this use case. 

I've used the solution for many years.

We also looked at Ciscos ASA and Fortigate.

We have proposed and deployed Check Point in a university environment that has multi-layer firewall protection for different zones, including DMZ, a server zone, Wi-Fi, a staff zone, a student hostel zone, guests, etc. Each zone is guarded by a firewall.

We need the NGFW to protect and secure the campus networks for more than 50,000 users. One of the key points is it is cost-effective and scalable to expand the throughput capacity. We expect the solution is possible to protect the networks for at least five to eight years without replacing the hardware investment. 

The solution provides better stability and some interesting features such as the ease of throughput expansion (or we can say the load sharing).

The scalability helps to offload the high traffic volume during school time. It also enhances redundancy. 

The load sharing capabilities using ClusterXL is possible to switch over the cluster mode to load sharing or Maestro. I also appreciate how easy it is to scale this product.

It is also great that the Check Point community (CheckMates portal) has a lot of helpful guidance. It helps us to work better and ease to find unfamiliar configurations on the new features, it is great for larger organizations as well as very small ones.

They offer very scalable solutions to extend computing resources if needed. We can expand the capacity in a very short time. 

The threat analysis reporting from their management console is very comprehensive and easy to use. 

Their web-based dashboard is well designed and offers much out-of-the-box reporting, and provides admins extensive customizations. 

In the operational GUI, Check Point provides rich customization methods to allow us to easily visualize/categorize objects in different colors. It makes operating the firewall much easier.

Under the same capacity requirements, Cheak Point is a bit higher than Fortinet yet much cheaper than Palo Alto. Although using Quantum Maestro to enhance scalability expansion is very helpful to cut down the total cost, it is still an issue for most of the company. Check Point is not a cheap solution and it's always painful to see exactly how much we need to spend on this. 

The upgrade process is not as easy as may be expected. If there is something that goes wrong, it causes the internet service to go down for the whole campus network. I am not happy with that situation since the upgrade process is a very common process. The outcome is not acceptable.

It is scalable and very easy to expand the throughput and resources.

Check Point firewall provide a very cool feature using Quantum Maestro Hyperscale Orchestrator, it provides on-demand cloud-like scaling of our on-premises security gateways. By using Maestro, we can aggregate multiple mid-level Check Point appliances to provide a high throughput volume. It is very useful to scale up to 52 appliances. If we use other firewall solutions, they can only aggregate up to TWO firewalls with same model in clustering or purchase a more high end model firewall. 

For a long term planning, we can expand the throughput by reusing the existing Check Point hardware investment and adding new appliances to.

The deployment is straightforward, however, the ongoing upgrades are not satisfactory.

We use the solution for network security, perimeter security, DMZ, antibot, antivirus, endpoint protection, email security, sandblast, and DLP. The environment is a multi-environment and consists of multiple networks, segmented and managed by a management server. These firewalls protect the network, external and internal. 

We are also protecting several customers and it allows remote access connection from anywhere in a secure way.

There are also site-to-site VPNs with different customers, vendors, and cloud providers, using the highest security encryption algorithms.

The organization is more secure. These firewalls work as expected. We have a perimeter and network segmentation well defined and firewall features and blades like IPS, Identity awareness, antibot, antivirus, threat prevention, endpoint security, and DLP, all allow the organization to have most of the security components centralized which allows for easier maintenance and monitoring. 

In relation to the monitoring, Check Point has tools that allow the administrator to track the traffic, and identify threats, attacks, and also check the forensics to understand what happened in case of a breach and ensure it won't happen again.

The most valuable elements include:

Smart View Tracker: To check the traffic logs easily. This is the best logging tool for me so far. You can identify almost everything from the logs, using a smart view tracker.

Smart Dashboard: allows for rule creation and administration and management and is user-friendly. The administration allows you to copy and paste rules, move the order, and create objects, pretty easily. It is very handy.

CPUSE: A Smart way to upgrade firewall software versions. You can easily verify if you can upgrade to the desired version, download the right package and upgrade, and also check the status of the upgrade. It's a great tool.

Error logs can be more specific. Sometimes the error shows only a general error and the solution could be hard to find or difficult to apply. 

Documentation can be improved. It has been improved, however, when you search for errors, in relation to documentation and how to solve it, sometimes it is not that simple to find the right solution. Troubleshooting errors could be sometimes difficult and some tools are only available for the Check Point support team. 

The price is also a factor to take into account. Other competitors offer low prices in relation to Check Point and the executive team may opt for the cheapest vendor (if you have to compare to another good one yet note a cheaper price).

I've used the solution for ten years.

The solution offers good scalability.

The solution offers good customer service and good support.

Positive

I have been using Check Point since the beginning.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We handled the setup in-house.

The solution is super stable.

The pricing could be better, however, the vendor is excellent and I strongly recommend it.

I did not evaluate other options.

I'm a consultant and Check Point partner. I have deployed a lot of Check Point firewalls and support Check Point firewalls for our customers. Our customer environments are different. I deployed standalone, cluster, and two-layer firewalls. 

One of our customers has over 200 branch offices which were protected by Check Point SMB appliances. All these appliances are managed by CheckPoint SmartProvisioning. 

This customer has one cluster Check Point which secures server segments and one cluster Check Point which secures client segments.

Check Point firewall products include a lot of modules. Application Control, IPS, email security, mobile access, content awareness, URL filtering, antivirus, antibot, and DLP. Check Point meets our customer requirements at the perimeter with an all-in-one solution. 

For example, the IPS blade prevents attacks with updated signatures. URL filtering policy control customers users' internet activity. Antivirus and antibot blade controls malicious activity and files. Mobile access blades give customers to access their sites from anywhere securely.

There are a lot of features that I found valuable for our customers. 

For example, active-active and active-standby high availability features are very useful. 

If you want to share traffic loads to both cluster members you can use the active-active feature, if you don't want to share traffic loads you can prefer active standby. Your connections sync on both cluster members at both high availability choices. That way, your connections are never lost. 

Another valuable feature is performance improvement ability. With ClusterXL and CoreXL you can improve performance.

Check Point should add additional management choices. For example, Check Point doesn't fully have management support via browser. You need to use Check Point's SmartConsole for management. SmartConsole is .exe and it is supported only on the MS Windows platform. If you are using Linux or a Mac you can not manage Check Point. You should be able to use a virtual PC whose OS is Windows inside the Linux or MAC. Check Point states that this is a decision made for security reasons, however, certain management features can be done through the browser, yet not fully.

I have been using the Check Point firewall for about 20 years.

Check Point support center is very professional.

Positive

We did not use a different solution previously.

After buying the firewall, you can use Check Point for a lifetime, however, it is a subscription base for content security features.

We also evaluated Fortinet and Cisco.

If you are looking for a firewall appliance that has a lot of security features, easy installation, and configuration, Check Point firewall products are the best for you.

I would like to see Check Point add more cloud management features and better integration with LAN software-defined networking. 

I rate Check Point eight out of 10 for stability. 

Check Point is definitely scalable.

It really depends on the customer's deployment and environment, but we often mix and match firewalls. Check Point is more expensive but easier to manage, and their presales and after-sale support are way better than Fortinet's.

Check Point is more complicated to deploy than Fortinet.

Check Point needs to lower its price drastically, and the licensing model is very complex.

I rate Check Point NGFW nine out of 10. I would only recommend it for medium to large enterprises.

I support multiple environments in Brazil, including banks, schools, government, and the military, mostly with on-premise equipment. Some of these environments had more than 30 Check Point NGFW clusters and some of these have 4 on-premise appliances on each cluster, using the full capabilities of the Check Point Blades.

Using the firewall blades, and the threat prevention blades, we can provide big security for our customers. In the lo4j case, Check Point acts fast and all of the systems are already protected from the threat.

My organization already used Check Point before I arrived, however, compared with open-source firewalls, is in another tier. The usability and maintenance are so much better.

The management in Check Point is exceptional. The Smartconsole feature centralizes the management features, reports, log visualizing, rules, objects, et cetera.

The Check Point could use more time to upgrade the VPN configurations console. At the moment it is not easy to configure some VPN S2S in Check Point. You need to keep opening several groups, objects, and options to configure one simple VPN.

I've used the solution for one year.

The stability is very good!

The scalability is very good.

The initial levels of support are not that good. 

Positive

We used pfSense and suggest just to go for the corporative product.

I don't have insights about the pricing for Check Point.

We did not evaluate other options. 

The need to get faster bug resolving issues. For example, the R80.40 has so many bugs at the moment. 

We primarily use it for internet security. We use it for firewalling, ePass, and threat detection including anti-malware protection, bug protection, and social inspection. We can also use it for DLP.

The solution helps out in our security goals. It acts as a primary source of protection for threats from the internet and is great for data leakage protection.

Most of the time, it's pretty stable. 

We have all the features we want or need in this appliance. It's been good so far. 

Sometimes there are security bugs, which is frustrating.  

Right now, we have a problem with DLP and this problem has become very big. Check Point, our firewall, is not handling data properly. There seems to be some sort of security bug.

I've used the solution for ten years or so. It's been a decade at least. 

The solution, for the most part, is very stable. We find it to be quite reliable. There are bugs, however, which have caused some issues. 

The solution is not scalable per se. There is only one way to upgrade and that is to buy new appliances.

Currently, we have around 7,000 people using this solution.

Likely, we won't be increasing usage. We are building new releases and we are considering changing this solution to another vendor. We might switch from Check Point to maybe Palo Alto or Cisco. We don't know which yet.

We haven't really dealt with technical support. We typically go through our partners.

We also use Cisco as well. We use Cisco ASA. Check Point, right now, is our primary firewall.

Check Point offers very good management. For an administrator, it's easy to manage this appliance, this firewall. Cisco, historically, has a big problem with this, specifically with FTD firewalls. There also tend to be some bugs you have to contend with.

I can't speak to the initial setup process. Our partner handled it and therefore I wasn't really part of the process. That said, for me. the process is pretty simple.

My understanding is that the deployment took a few days. 

I'd rate the experience of the initial setup at a four out of five. 

About two people were able to handle the implementation process. Typically, they are architects and engineers. 

We had a partner set up the solution for us.

We have seen a decent ROI. I'd rate it at a four out of five. 

I can't speak to the cost of the solution. We deal with it through a partner, and I'm not involved in any of the pricing aspects. 

We are considering switching to Palo Alto or maybe Cisco in the near future. 

We are a customer and an end-user.

Some blades, some function blades on Check Point, are very good, however, it's not all of them. Right now, I know DLP and social inspection are a problem. New users should be aware of this. 

Overall, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We are using the new version of Check Point NGFW. 

We use the solution for web page protection to provide the security service which is lacking in Bolivia, a poverty ridden country. 

I like the facility of the product configuration. The ease with which the solution can be put into production makes it easy for my employers and for me to provide client support. 

The interface could be better. There is much equipment that is involved in the monitoring of many clients in a single interface. 

With other platforms, such as WatchGuard, it is very simple to manage four, five or six of these. We are talking about a lot of clients. The platforms for doing monitoring should be addressed. 

The solution boasts good stability. 

The solution boasts good scalability. 

I have not had need to make use of technical support. 

The initial setup is easy. 

When it comes to the deployment and maintenance, there are two people involved, one for the deployment and the other for monitoring, consisting of an engineer and a technician. 

I feel that the clients are very satisfied with the product.

I don't have any particular advice when it comes to the deployment process. This will depend on the client's needs. 

I rate Check Point NGFW as an eight out of ten.