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Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) vs ShieldX comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Check Point Cloud Firewall ...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
244
Ranking in other categories
Firewalls (8th), Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (1st), Vulnerability Management (5th), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (3rd), Cloud and Data Center Security (3rd), Container Security (6th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (5th), WAN Edge (3rd), Unified Threat Management (UTM) (4th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (5th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (4th), Compliance Management (5th)
ShieldX
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Microsegmentation Software (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Security Systems solutions, they serve different purposes. Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) is designed for Firewalls and holds a mindshare of 2.7%, up 0.6% compared to last year.
ShieldX, on the other hand, focuses on Microsegmentation Software, holds 2.5% mindshare, up 0.4% since last year.
Firewalls Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security)2.7%
Fortinet FortiGate13.3%
Cisco Secure Firewall7.8%
Other76.2%
Firewalls
Microsegmentation Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ShieldX2.5%
Illumio Segmentation22.3%
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation18.6%
Other56.599999999999994%
Microsegmentation Software
 

Featured Reviews

Oscar Nunez - PeerSpot reviewer
Ingeniero en redes y Telecomunicaciones at K-IT
Centralized management has reduced policy time and provides reliable multitenant protection
What I would like, what I think they should improve a little is the management of objects at large scale. When you work with multiple domains, there are thousands of network objects. Detecting duplicates and consistency across domains is a very manual process that should be more automated. Another thing: the SmartConsole interface is very powerful and very good, but the learning curve, compared to other solutions in the market from other manufacturers, could be modernized. I think it does not necessarily have to be done from a client application; it could be done via web, because via web I know that not all the options you have in SmartConsole are available. So it would be good if it could also be done from the web and all the options were available. Another thing that I would really like is more automation with Ansible or Terraform. I know it has improved in recent versions, but I think it is still not mature enough. Compared to other manufacturers that do have a bit more in terms of automation capabilities in integration flows with Ansible or Terraform, Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) could improve. Another thing that could be improved a little would be the TAC response time, because when there are very complex cases, I think there should be more speed initially, more ownership of those urgent cases, and not leave the customer waiting. This has happened to me: when I have cases open with Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) TAC, sometimes they do not respond and I have to keep insisting, and I think that part should improve. I do not know if it depends on who takes the ticket or on the severity of the ticket, but sometimes I have had to insist a lot, and that would be the only problem. Once they attend to me and become involved in the case, the responses they give are very professional and really help directly resolve the problems when there is a bug or troubleshooting to do. As I said, I would like to see a specific improvement in SmartConsole. I think if they improved it—how to say it—gave it a facelift so you could access all the options directly from a browser, that would be great, because sometimes, for one reason or another, you cannot download SmartConsole or, for some reason, the SmartConsole client does not start correctly, and you could do it directly from the browser. I think that would be a good option to improve. Another thing would be that in multidomain environments, I would like a global search function for objects and rules. That is, you could enter and search across all domains at once, because right now you have to go domain by domain, and in environments with many customers, you spend quite a bit of time; you have to exit one domain and enter another. So those would be the improvements I would like to see.
MP
IT Director at park holidays uk
Proactively monitors, blocks, and reports what it has blocked; and self-updates meaning there is zero maintenance
The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput. The traffic through our website depends on holiday bookings. It's very quiet in November through January, and then our traffic picks up quite rapidly and, at our peak, we will take in excess of a million pounds of business a day through our website. The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides. Uptime on the system has been 648 days and we do very little to it because it self-updates and alerts. It does everything that we need it to do, so the administration side of it is zero. One of the beauties about ShieldX is that it's such a good "fire-and-forget" product.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The administration portal panel is very intuitive."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring. We can easily monitor what kind of stuff comes over to our network and we can then check the dashboard and work accordingly."
"I would recommend Check Point as it's an effective tool, and implementation is very easy."
"Technical support is excellent, and we have a country SE who provides support."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"The IPS, application and URL filtering, as well as Identity Awareness, are all very valuable features."
"It is scalable. It's a cloud solution, so it's easy to implement and manage."
"The most valuable Check Point CloudGuard feature is the firewall; I also value the user authentication, IPS, and application control features."
"Once you install it you can virtually forget about it; it's very low-maintenance and high-protection."
"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."
"We were able to see what devices are talking to each other, giving us more visibility."
"...It takes the exact same policies that you would apply to your on-premise environment and enables you to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."
"The Adaptive Intention Engine is fantastic. It allows us to develop security policies using the language of our internal customers. It's machine-learning applied to security workflows. That allows us to much more easily construct the policies that will protect those workflows."
"Very often, when new challengers come in, what they do is they end up coming in at a lower cost with more functionality."
"ShieldX makes it a lot easier and a lot simpler to define your policies and define your rules, and that greatly reduces the opportunity for user error."
"The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides."
 

Cons

"The biggest thing is the documentation aspect of Dome9 is a little lacking."
"The only pain points we have had with it were when we did major version upgrades. Rather than being able to do incremental upgrades on those, we had to completely redeploy. I know that has changed recently, but we had some hiccups when we did the upgrades. This is the only issue we have had."
"We want to be able to customize the solution more in order to meet the needs of our company."
"Better documentation would be welcome."
"It should have some options to activate API calls to the platform in the cloud, another improvement would be that when the rules are colonized and they want to be published."
"To be honest, we don't have many clients who have taken CloudGuard, as the feedback has not been that great."
"The dashboard customization has room for improvement."
"Today, we are trying to look more into encrypted traffic."
"With any kind of tool like ShieldX, where you're in the cloud instead of a traditional firewall, you're using CPU resources in those environments to provide the protection. So there's a cost associated with CPU resources. I'm pressing upon them to make the product much more efficient and use less CPUs to do the same thing."
"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory. We can't seem to set it up."
"There should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports. It would be nice to have a quarterly or biannual review of what ShieldX has blocked."
"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting."
"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so. As the vendor continues to evolve and add future functionality, we want to make sure that we are still keeping up with the integrations, etc. Time will be the key factor here. The proper support for some of the latest technologies, Docker containers, etc. They need to keep up with threat landscape, so we will see how the security get layered. This is what we are going to be keeping an eye on."
"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"​They support either annual licensing or hourly. At the time of our last negotiation, it was either one or the other, you could not mix or match. I would have liked to mix/match. ​"
"We are using our BYOL. We are using our existing Check Point discounts to work with licensing. Overall, it is very competitive. Its pricing is reasonable to me."
"The license for CloudGuard Posture Management is about $80 a year, and it's based on your cloud footprint, not the number of users. So you could have a million users, and it doesn't matter."
"The pricing is extremely competitive."
"The tool's pricing is moderate. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"It's not very expensive. It isn't very cheap either. Its price is okay. It depends on how much money you have. It might be expensive for some companies. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"The cost is on the higher side, as it is based on workload, hence we need to decide which VPC or workload needs to be part of CloudGuard."
"It is not expensive, but it is a little bit above the middle range. There are other solutions that are a little more expensive than this, but they also have some interesting features."
"We are actually expecting our costs to drop in the coming year, but it is just a matter of the licensing expiring. That is going to happen in the next six months or so. Then, we will start to see a decrease in overall spend."
"ShieldX also enables us to migrate to cloud environments faster. That is an important part of it for sure because it takes the exact same policies that we would apply to our on-premise environment and enables us to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."
"For a three-year deal we paid £55,000 plus tax... But, and this is a big "but," this was over two years ago. ShieldX had only just hit the market. We were the first company in Europe to buy ShieldX."
"We are very happy with the pricing and licensing. It's about getting a site-wide license. One of the challenges that we've had with our previous vendor had been the cost of licensing."
"Security policies are now applied as applications are going up. Because it's automated, we don't have the three to four week delay. The insertion of applications in the cloud for us dropped from an average of three to four weeks to a couple of days."
"ShieldX ensures that we can have the separation needed for our environment to avoid drastically increasing the cost on the licensing side. From this perspective, it's been very positive and helpful."
"For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX. It might not be the big name out there, but it does everything that you are looking for in microsegmentation at a very low price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
16%
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
21%
Government
10%
Insurance Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business132
Midsize Enterprise53
Large Enterprise144
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?
Since we use a unified standard for using policies and modules in Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security), we can clearly plan which modules we need to activate on a parti...
What needs improvement with Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?
The main limitations of Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) are not in Check Point itself but in the cloud platforms on which it is deployed. Because not all clouds ha...
What is your primary use case for Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?
Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) is the main manager that provides network security in different forms in my organization. The primary task that Check Point solves ...
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Also Known As

CloudGuard IaaS, Check Point vSEC, CloudGuard IaaS, Check Point Virtual Systems, Check Point CloudGuard Network Security, Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP
APEIRO, ShieldX APEIRO
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Physicians Choice Laboratory Services, Helvetica Insurance
Iowa State University
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