Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) Reviews

The solution is our main firewall. It protects our perimeter.

The tool has solid firmware with very few vulnerabilities. We don't need to upgrade it for vulnerabilities. It is rare when compared to the competitors. The product’s performance is good. My organization chose the product because it is stable and provides a very good Software Blade.

The tool must improve its support. The support provided by partners gets expensive.

I have been using the solution for around six years.

The product is stable.

The solution protects the entire perimeter. Every user passes through the firewall. It is used daily. We have around eight administrators. The solution requires very little maintenance.

The initial setup was easy.

The solution is expensive. A medium data center would cost around $17,000 per year for a medium enterprise.

Except for Palo Alto, Check Point is good compared to its competitors. Cisco ASA lacks features.

It is a good product. There are other competitors. Check Point NGFW is easy to deploy, manage, implement, and troubleshoot. The operation is pretty simple. Even a few operations people can run it very well. It is pretty much stable. We need to safeguard the data of our organization very well. Check Point NGFW is a leading solution provider. Security products must not have many vulnerabilities. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

My main use case for Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) is that we use it for a perimeter firewall and separation firewall.

The best features Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) offers are that it's a good product with a lot of features and a great GUI interface to manage it.

The interface of Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) stands out because in a single point, I can read all the logs of my device.

Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) has positively impacted my organization because it is our core security system, and it performs effectively.

At the moment, I haven't any ideas on how Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) can be improved.

I have been using Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) for about ten years.

Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) is very stable.

For our company, Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) is scalable enough.

We reached out for customer support and received the correct support, the support that we needed.

Positive

Before Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW), we used an old Check Point firewall.

I don't have information on whether we have seen a return on investment with Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW).

I don't know the price because I only made the technical decision, but I spoke about the price with my manager.

We stayed with Check Point and did not evaluate other options before choosing Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW).

I would rate Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) a nine out of ten because I think we can improve the product a little bit.

My advice to others looking into using Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) is that it is a good product and can solve a lot of security problems in your company.

My company does not have a business relationship with the vendor other than being a customer, as we are an end user.

I was offered a gift card or incentive for this review.

I prefer not to use my real name or company name when publishing my review.

We are using the solution for the perimeter. It's used as a core firewall, with almost all transactions passing through the firewall. For instance, in a cellular phone company, all transactional authorizations pass through the firewall, while in a bank, authorizations for branches and ATMs go through the firewall. The main customers are in the BFSI, telcos, industry manufacturing, and other large enterprise sectors.

Check Point's solutions allow organizations to operate securely with a reliable core firewall in place, ensuring that transactions proceed smoothly.

The Check Point firewall is used as a core firewall offering high reliability with at least two synchronized data centers, creating a fault-tolerant configuration. It is considered a very stable platform with minimal bugs.

Technically, there is no need for improvement. That said, they need to be more aggressive and protect more of the channels on the commercial side. Additionally, the user interface could be more user-friendly.

We have been using Check Point solutions for over twenty-five years, since the very beginning.

The firewall is highly stable, being described as one of the most reliable, with a stable platform and few bugs.

Using the Maestro technology, the firewall has good scalability. It allows for flexibility and growth by stacking clippings without needing to change the chassis.

Customer service is generally good. With Diamond or Diamond Plus service for banks, the support level meets customer expectations. The internal team of Check experts also ensures issues are resolved efficiently.

Positive

We are familiar with and have supported other solutions like Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Cisco yet primarily do business with Check Point.

Initial setup can be complex, especially in large or redundant deployments. Expertise is required to manage configurations, especially with complex operations and a high volume of users and VPNs.

The implementation team has around 20 people, with a total group including maintenance and support numbering 60.

Monetizing the risk is complex, and despite having software for calculating ROI in security, traditional calculations like the FAIR methodology do not apply efficiently in Latin America.

Check Point and Palo Alto solutions are among the more expensive options, but once a platform is adopted, switching is difficult. Clients tend to stay with the same brand for extended periods.

We have evaluated solutions from Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Cisco, however, the main offering is Check Point.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We needed stateful inspection, logging, integration with Active Directory, and the ability to monitor devices using standard SNMP for use cases. Now, with the tool's Skyline product and OpenTelemetry, we can monitor it through Prometheus and Grafana. It has all the features we needed when we certified the solution.

Integration with Active Directory, IPS, standard VPN, and the firewall itself are the most valuable features for us. We haven't yet certified or aren't using Application Control, anti-bot, or anti-virus features.

Significant improvements have been made in the product. I started working with the R65 code and then upgraded to R74.40. When they transitioned from R77.30 to R80.x, they made major back-end modifications, switching from a flat file system to Solaris and Postgres. This was a big step that neither customers nor their support staff were fully prepared for.

Now, they're adding more features due to the increased flexibility of the new back-end. The main improvement I'd suggest is better preparation when introducing new features. Before releasing, they must train their support staff to troubleshoot these new features. The transition from R77.30 to R80.x was problematic due to a lack of preparation by Check Point, customers, and support.

Sizing is crucial, but we've never had issues with the products we've sized for each environment. The Maestro solution provides a lot of flexibility. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the highest scalability, I'd rate it a ten.

I use Palo Alto firewalls. Check Point NGFW was the first to invent the stateful inspection firewall. They focus more on security and try to keep their motto of "keep security simple". They don't get bogged down in marketing or complicated terminology when using their products.

Even enabling a firewall blade on Palo Alto requires learning about different sync ports, how sync ports differ between chassis, and navigating through multiple GUI tabs for configuration. It's not as straightforward.

On the other hand, Check Point NGFW has kept things very simple for deployment. You set it up once, and then you can repeat the same process repeatedly.

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the easiest, I'd rate the initial setup as ten. The process is straightforward: you rack and stack, configure the management code, create a standard policy, establish SIC, and push the policy. This process has remained consistent over the years.

For deployment, it took us longer than the typical two weeks because we had to design solutions for different scenarios. Check Point offers various options, such as clustering solutions, Maestro solutions, and standalone solutions. We had different use cases—some required standard clusters with ClusterXL, while others needed scalability solutions like Maestro. We also had to factor in sizing considerations.

The certification process took about the same amount of time as other products. We've been using the Maestro solution for a while now, so when new platforms are released, there isn't much change required beyond certifying the new hardware and ensuring backward compatibility with our certified solution.

Initially, it took a little more than two weeks to certify. However, the actual deployment still follows the same standard process and is actually easier now than it was in the past.

We call the team responsible for deploying certified solutions to the service delivery team. It's made up of two groups: build services and service delivery. The build services team works with our networking team to ensure our network and peering devices are set up right to host the firewall.

The service delivery team focuses more on the firewall itself. We need about three or four extra people from build services for firewall deployment. They act as go-betweens with the network team, ensuring our firewall solution works well with the peering devices when we put it in place. The build services team is important because they ensure everything fits together properly when we set up our firewall.

For maintenance, the solution is pretty stable. We have a global team, but a separate team handles regular firewall changes and daily operations. For support, we have about ten people total - three groups of three people each. This team manages around 1200 firewalls, including Check Point and Palo Alto devices.

Check Point NGFW is much cheaper than other platforms, including Palo Alto. Its scalability, especially with the Maestro solution, is a big advantage. If you're looking for good security at a reasonable price with a good return on investment, I believe Check Point NGFW is the way to go.

I've been dealing with Check Point NGFW for my entire career. I started with their Stateful Inspection feature. The term "Next Generation Firewall" is just marketing. Check Point's UTM product was designed from the ground up with next-generation features. They have a feature called Blaze. Besides stateful inspection firewalls and VPNs, they offer IPS, application control, URL filtering, antivirus, and antibot. You can also integrate it with third-party tools like Active Directory for authentication. This combination of features is what's called a next-generation firewall.

Other vendors use terms like app ID or user ID. They focus less on ports and more on ensuring services match their intended use. For example, if port 22 is enabled, it should be for SSH service, not something else. We use both Check Point NGFW and other products. I think if you commit to one vendor's approach, it can be hard to switch late.

We use Check Point NGFW as our data center and branch location firewalls.

The solution is robust and can handle heavy workloads and user traffic well. The product is good. 

The tool's support is lacking. We find almost all its features useful, except for some challenges with VPN.

I have been working with the product for ten years. 

I rate the product's stability an eight out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability an eight out of ten. My company has 5000 users. 

The initial setup can be complex, especially for BGP configurations. I'd rate it a five out of ten for ease of setup. It's neither too hard nor too easy - it depends on your requirements. We deployed it on-premises. The initial deployment of our enterprise-grade device took about three months. We need about two people for maintenance, mainly for operational changes when needed.

We mostly did the deployment ourselves, with some professional services support from Check Point. Three to four people were involved in the deployment, including one from Check Point to validate our work.

The Harmony bundle is interesting, with many new features, but we're not evaluating it much as we're moving to FortiGate. We're not planning to increase the usage of Check Point NGFW. We're looking into SD-WAN and moving towards FortiGate.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

It's just enterprise firewalls, firewall clusters for redundancy to secure the company network from the internet, and as well as a data center firewall, for example, if you want to split up subnets to control traffic between them.

The management is very handy and intuitive, and it has a lot of features. I think it's one of the products in this market which has the most possibilities.

I saw some other firewall vendors or firewall solutions from other vendors. And maybe I like it because I'm very familiar with Check Point and the management of the Check Point gateways. So, probably, I'm just not aware of how other solutions work and how to use them. 

We also see or have a lot of customers with Palo Alto. That's also a solution we see a lot, but we have been a Check Point partner for more than seven or eight years since the beginning of our company. We have done a lot of research on firewall solutions. 

In our opinion, it's one of the best because the management is very handy. So it's easy to implement every possible configuration, and you have a good oversight of your rule set. 

If I compare it with Cisco Meraki, for example, if the rules grow, then it's very hard to get oversight or to have oversight over the whole rule set. So then it becomes hard to manage.

With Check Point, it's easy because even when you have 200 or more rules, it's still very user-friendly, and you can still quickly manage your whole rule set.

What I like about Meraki is the whole cloud-managed feature, where it can configure gateways in the cloud and preconfigure it as well. So I don't need to have access to the device or create a configuration in the cloud. 

And as soon as the firewall comes online connected to the internet, then it downloads its configuration from the cloud. I think Check Point does also have such a solution, but I'm not aware that it's as easy as Cisco Meraki. Sometimes it would be nice if they would have the same possibilities.

I have been using it for about five years now. 

I have not yet faced any challenges with performance or stability. Sometimes when we implement core firewalls, there are applications that have longer session timeouts than the Check Point firewalls in the default settings. 

Windows has a default session timeout for about two hours, I think, and Check Point's is one hour. So, it's not a performance issue, but the application will not run as well as before the security gateway analyzes and blocks traffic. So, it depends.

Scalability  is a very good point of Check Point's solution. They can scale very well and very large.

The technical support is also very well and specific. It's very useful to have technical support from Check Point.

Positive

I have experience with Nutanix Flow. It's also possible to enable training in Nutanix Flow where you can redirect the traffic to Check Point gateways. I think that's a very useful feature if you need layer seven traffic analysis and blocks. But I don't have any customers, or we don't have any customers, who use chaining. We also don't have any customers who use a micro-segmentation solution from Check Point. So, I'm not aware if they have a comparable solution like Flow.

For the initial setup, you need a good knowledge of the operating system, Gaia OS. It needs some knowledge to get started, but if you've done it once, then it's easygoing.

Normally, we check the customer's requirements. Then we start to deploy the gateway and start with a basic rule set so the customer is able to refine it for their needs. If we are in charge of creating a complete rule set, we will bring all the requirements into a concept and then create a rule set in a more suitable way.

Some customers have very basic requirements. If it's just to deploy the gateways, then it's very easy and quick. You just need maybe a few days and a maintenance window outside of business hours. But there are also customers who have a lot more requirements, like scanning or analyzing the traffic for subnets inside of the network. 

For example, a core firewall can be very time-consuming. You need to do a lot more research and concepts or write concepts on how to achieve that. That can take a few months.

For maintenance, you need to know what you do. It can be difficult if you don't know what you want to achieve. If you are not aware of network security, then probably it's not that easy, and you may run into configuration errors or mistakes. It's easy to manage, but you have to know what you do.

Check Point is not the cheapest vendor in the market, but it has everything you need compared to other solutions. So that's probably the main reason for the cost or the prices. I think it's probably on the same level as Palo Alto.

I would recommend Check Point to other users who are looking into implementing it.

I would advise others to compare or write down their requirements and have a look to see if Check Point is able to fulfill all the requirements.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

The primary use case of many organizations is to protect their environments from outside cyber threats across multiple layers of infrastructure. For example:

1. At a perimeter level, it protects the network at the parameter; many organizations use this firewall.

2. It provides scalability and seamless traffic flow in a network. 

3. It has all-in-one next-generation features, so many organizations save money using this firewall.

Check Point NGFW helps in many ways, including:

1. Using the application filter feature, I can block all the unwanted applications which are not used in the organization. Due to this, less bandwidth is used in the network. This leads to a cost cut in the ISP bill. 

2. With the help of URL filtering, I can block very easily. If this is not blocked, users may surf malicious websites or download malicious files.                             

3. Evaluation licensing helps us to conduct POCs and explain all features to customers. 

I love the application filter, as the user cannot access any applications that are not relevant to them. This reduces the likelihood that someone may access an application that contains a malicious link or file that the user may download, which in turn reduces ransomware attacks and DDoS attacks.

They just need to improve the technical support and professional services in India. We have received many complaints about them from clients and also face the same issue ourselves. 

For the past one and half years I have been using Check Point Firewall for security.

We have a good impression of stability. 

The performance is very good; there is no issue with performance.

I've only deployed Check Point Firewalls and have used other older Check Point devices that reached EoL.

The initial set up is simple. Users just need to run the wizard to set up, and they are done.

I deployed the solution for many customers in the banking sector.

Costing and licensing are high as compared to other OEMs.

I mostly work on Check Point; others which I have evaluated include Cisco and Fortigate.

Mostly enterprise customers use it for their system security as their main firewall. For example, some customers have multiple backup connections, including fiber connections, for redundancy. 

They use Check Point as the main firewall, and others use it for email scanning and file scanning to detect any vulnerabilities.

The firewall scanning, like antivirus scanning and malware scanning, are very good. Blocking the user is also very easy. If you want to block a user, we can just do it within the solution.

The reporting is quite easy and good, and you can see traffic in real-time. But compared to Sophos, Sophos is still better. There are still areas in Check Point that need to be improved.

It's actually quite good, but the only problem we faced was during COVID when people wanted to work from home. 

We had to use third-party software to give users access because the Check Point option didn't work as expected. So we used Check Point in the front, but we used third-party software for the virtualization of the applications and everything.

When using redundant connections, sometimes there are issues like one connection going down and switching to another connection. Also, breaking rules can be complicated. 

For example, if you want to make a rule for a specific connection, like assigning some users to one ISP and other users to another ISP, you have to use another device, like a third-party firewall intervention and routing, to get the desired results. Other than that, it's good performance-wise.

I've been working with Check Point for the past six or seven years. We always work with the latest version.

It's very stable. No issues there.

It's scalable.

Our clients have raised questions to technical support. They all have accounts, so we give them the login details. They send an email to support and get a support request. But normally, we try to handle everything on our own. 

If there's something we can't handle, like a firmware-level issue, only then do we get support from Check Point.

It depends on the client requirements also. Some government agencies need Check Point, and some clients need others like Cisco or Sophos. After Cisco, a lot of clients have changed to Sophos. So, we provide solutions depending on the client's requirements.

The initial setup is straightforward, just like any other normal firewall. 

• Deployment strategy: 

The deployment process depends on the client. For example, if it's an existing customer with an existing firewall, we first see what their current requirements are from the existing firewall, what they need to implement but cannot, or what challenges they are having. 

Then we compare the features of the existing firewall and Check Point firewall, and we tell them what the rules will be, like incoming and outbound rules. We try to see what is the fastest way, without any downtime, how we can point or configure the checkpoint. 

Then, after that, we do the testing, because almost all of the offices need that. So, normally, once we set it up, we give them one month for testing. Normally, for a better line or something, we just use a certain IT department or a sub-department for testing. After that, if it's okay, we hand it over.

In a nutshell:

Requirement Analysis →  Feature Comparison  → Rule Definition → Testing and Validation → Phased Rollout → Client Acceptance

• Deployment time: 

Normally, for a site, more or less, less than one month. It depends on the number of users. If there are a very large number of users, like 600,000, then it will take around one month or more.

• Deployment resources: 

Normally, we have two technicians working. One is from the Philippines, trained in Sophos and Check Point. We don't need many more staff for the implementation.

• Maintenance: 

It's very easy. Only the licensing. Every year, we have to pay, but sometimes clients talk about the cost. Also, very recently, there was a ransomware issue. The only issue is, for example, if it's ransomware, and it doesn't get detected by Check Point and gets infected from another source, we have to prove that it's not from the outside but from the inside. Because there are a lot of case scenarios like this, those are the things mostly.

• Integration capabilities: 

Integration is a little bit challenging. It's much easier for integration with other applications and domains. When integrating with a domain, there are still some small issues. For example, when applying a group from the domain controller, we sometimes need to test a firewall and do some reporting. There are small issues like that for the integration of LDAP. Other than that, it's good. It can pull up the users and groups, but there are some minor issues when we apply them.

It's effective and good.

Compared to Sophos and others, Check Point pricing is good for the current market.

In terms of features, Check Point and other firewalls are almost the same. There are no special or advanced features.

I can recommend it to other people. Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten.