Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload

Download the complete report

Helped 881,707 peers since 2012

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 CloudGuard Netw...

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

161

Ranking in other categories

Firewalls (8th), Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (1st), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (3rd), WAN Edge (3rd), Unified Threat Management (UTM) (3rd)

Cisco Secure Workload

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

8th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (15th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is 2.7%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 11.0%, down from 13.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud and Data Center Security Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security	2.7%
Cisco Secure Workload	11.0%
Other	86.3%

Cloud and Data Center Security

Featured Reviews

David Gippner

Network administrator at Helios IT Service GmbH

Valuable features improve operations while providing high security standards

I honestly do not know how it can be improved anymore. There are probably people with more knowledge or experience who could suggest improvements. Most of the solutions we have used have been straightforward and effective. Occasionally, there is a strange bug, however, we just contact Check Point for a hotfix if we are a significant client. And since that is our situation, the solution works. There might be a possibility for Check Point to offer more training opportunities for users to get to know the solution better, perhaps through courses or similar resources. However, it depends on our company's arrangements with Check Point. In our case, we have a vendor involved. Everything we do with Check Point must go through the vendor first, which is somewhat inconvenient. It would be easier to deal with Check Point directly, however, it depends on the vendor. There is a wealth of material available online for those technically inclined. In this fast-paced industry, we must continue learning. Courses or online meetings, like Zoom or Teams sessions, for one or two hours each week, would be helpful. Despite using it for a long time, there are always new features. For example, just last week, I discovered a new feature that had been in the software for years yet it was not visible due to its placement behind multiple menus. Teaching sessions would be beneficial, yet it is our responsibility to learn, so we cannot entirely rely on Check Point.

Read full review

Raj Metkar

Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA

Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It was very easy to install the solution, and the architecture meant we didn't have to worry about exceeding the solution's capacity."

"I have no problems with stability. There is no downtime."

"Check Point CloudGuard Network Security has positively impacted our organization by improving our security posture; we have seen a sharp reduction in successful intrusion attacks because of its unified threat prevention, along with greater visibility and control."

"The most important feature is that we are able to use Check Point CloudGuard Firewall for our cloud security. We can make the deployment automated. We do not require manual intervention."

"Check Point, in general, provides ease of day-to-day use, management, and log review, which is a significant advantage."

"The few times I needed customer service, I was very happy with it."

"Customers appreciate the CME plugin for automatically understanding assets within the cloud. This information appears in the manager, allowing users to tag the assets and adjust policies and rules accordingly."

"SSL/TLS traffic inspection features are used for advanced threat prevention against secure SSL traffic."

More Check Point CloudGuard Network Security pros

"Instead of proving that all the access control lists are in place and all the EPGs are correct, we can just point the auditor to a dashboard and point out that there aren't any escaped conversations. It saves an enormous, enormous amount of time."

"The most valuable feature is micro-segmentation, which is the most important with respect to visibility."

"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."

"By using Tetration insight, we are able to get the latency on our level accounts and we can determine whatever the issue is with the application latency itself."

"The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network."

"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is security."

"The product offers great visibility into the network so we can enforce security measures."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

Cons

"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."

"The solution could improve to have a DLP feature."

"A threat categorization system can be added to give users the authority to define vulnerable attacks and classify areas that can threaten the workflow system."

"The SD-WAN could be better."

"The core security features of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security work really well, but a few usability areas hold it back: the policy propagation speed and parts of the interface."

"Documentation might become too complex or too spread out, especially for newcomers."

"There may be some latency."

"The business and product development team should introduce a high-end feedback collection mechanism and analyze the customer requirements constructively."

More Check Point CloudGuard Network Security cons

"The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."

"They should scale down the hardware a bit. The initial hardware investment is two million dollars so it's a price point problem. The issue with the price comes from the fact that you have to have it with enormous storage and enormous computes."

"It has an uninviting interface."

"There's room for improvement when it comes to Cisco Secure Workload. A couple of internal areas could be refined a little bit. They are trying to solve it, depending on where you suppose the agent is. Suppose you have the agent on both the server and the client, which could be the front-end server or web server connecting to the. In that case, if those two are communicating on RPC, the server can look into its configuration. It could go down and find the configuration file on the FTP server and then set the policies to it. But there are a lot of different FTP servers out there. It's also a complex case for the tool to support all FTP servers."

"It is not so easy to use and configure. It needs a bunch of further resources to work, which is mainly the biggest downside of it. The deployment is huge."

"It is highly scalable, but there is a limitation that it is only available on Cisco devices."

"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."

"Secure Workload is a little complicated to use, and the dashboard isn't intuitive, so it takes a while to learn how to use it."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When customers compare it with Sophos or any other products, the price is on the higher side."

"Licensing is simply by the number of hosts that you are looking to protect within your environment. It makes it much easier to ensure that you are covering your environment."

"It is more expensive than other solutions and would be more competetive in the market if it came down in price."

"Pricing of CloudGuard is pretty fair when you have a single account. It's comparable with other cloud providers. But for our use case, it got really pricey when we had to deploy multiple CloudGuards on multiple accounts in different regions, because you can't have CloudGuard protecting multiple regions. That's the big thing."

"Licensing is available on a monthly or yearly basis."

"The licensing model has since transitioned to a cluster-based variant."

"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."

"I quite like the way they priced it. It is very reasonable."

More Check Point CloudGuard Network Security pricing and cost advice

"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."

"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."

"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."

"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."

"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."

"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."

"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud and Data Center Security solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Marketing Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Performing Arts

Manufacturing Company

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	67
Midsize Enterprise	40
Large Enterprise	76

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	8

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?

The tool's most valuable feature is its management console.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?

Although I do not know much about the pricing or setup costs, Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is very cost-effective. If you want to secure your organization completely from all ends agains...

What needs improvement with Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security could be improved with faster policy propagation across large multi-cloud environments and more intuitive dashboards for complex rule sets.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?

CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discovery. This raises questions about the resources required to discover and write po...

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

What is your primary use case for Cisco Secure Workload?

When we onboarded Cisco Secure Workload, the usual use case was to discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map for Cisco ACI. As the network team, we chose to implement A...

Azure Firewall vs Check Point CloudGuard Network Security

Comparisons

Compared 13% of the time

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs Check Point CloudGuard Network Security

Compared 12% of the time

Fortinet FortiGate vs Check Point CloudGuard Network Security

Compared 10% of the time

Cisco Secure Firewall vs Check Point CloudGuard Network Security

Compared 9% of the time

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs Check Point CloudGuard Network Security

Compared 5% of the time

More Check Point CloudGuard Network Security Competitors

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 17% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 15% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 11% of the time

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 11% of the time

Panoptica vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 2% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

Product Reports

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security

Download Check Point CloudGuard Network Security product report

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security report

Cisco Secure Workload

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Also Known As

CloudGuard IaaS, Check Point vSEC, CloudGuard IaaS, Check Point Virtual Systems, Check Point CloudGuard Network Security

Cisco Tetration

Overview

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security offers centralized management, robust threat prevention, and seamless integration with major public clouds, ensuring consistent security for cloud and on-premises environments. It combines ease of use with flexibility across diverse IT infrastructure.

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security provides comprehensive protection for IT infrastructures in AWS, Azure, and hybrid environments. It ensures firewall security, managing traffic and securing cloud infrastructures while maintaining network protection and compliance enforcement. Organizations benefit from its centralized security governance, enhanced visibility, and threat prevention for both perimeter and internal security. It offers seamless integration with leading cloud platforms, allowing for efficient deployment and scalability, aligning with modern cloud requirements.

What are the key features of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?

Ease of Setup and Use: Provides a user-friendly setup process and intuitive operation.
Robust Threat Prevention: Offers advanced capabilities to safeguard against potential threats.
Auto-Scaling: Adjusts resources dynamically to meet demand without manual intervention.
Centralized Management: Ensures uniform security policies across cloud and on-premises environments.
Integration with Major Public Clouds: Seamlessly works with AWS, Azure, and other leading platforms.
Intuitive ACL Menu: Simplifies access control list management with an easy-to-navigate interface.
Customizable Policy Options: Allows for personalized security settings suited to specific requirements.

What benefits should companies look for in Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?

Enhanced Operational Efficiency: Through automation and comprehensive reporting, organizations streamline operations.
Consistent Security Management: Offers uniform policies across different environments, reducing complexity.
Improved Threat Detection: Increases the ability to identify and respond to threats quickly.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing or changing infrastructure needs without compromising security.

In industries such as finance, healthcare, and tech, Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is vital for protecting sensitive data, managing compliance, and safeguarding daily operations. Its robust integration capabilities support diverse infrastructure setups, assisting companies in maintaining high-security standards efficiently.

Check Point Software Technologies

Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

Reviews from Real Users

“The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

Cisco

Sample Customers

Physicians Choice Laboratory Services, Helvetica Insurance

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload