Check Point Security Management

Our main use case for Check Point Security Management  is to use it as a firewall where we block all the malware, all the Trojans, and all the policies we have enabled, and all the VLANs have been enabled into this. To secure our internal IT infrastructure, we use this security management.

A specific example of how we use Check Point Security Management  in our daily operations is that we use it as a firewall that captures all the inbound and outbound traffic, not allowing any users to reach out to any malware, bot activity, or anything else. It is helping us more than my previous device.

Regarding our main use case, it handles a lot of logs. It has a hard disk inside that saves all the logs until it fills up, allowing me to see what happened, what kind of notifications were issued, and what kind of malware attacks occurred to which device and IP. We can see everything that happened and what is going to happen, securing all my IT infrastructure according to the IT field.

The best features Check Point Security Management offers, which stand out to me the most, are mainly the dashboard, which captures all the things, showing which devices are connected and what is getting hampered, displayed in different dashboards. I recommend Check Point Security Management 10 out of 10 for everyone, especially in smaller organizations. Currently, I am using SMB for 500 to 550 users, and it is very useful, depending on another firewall.

The dashboard feature works by showing not all Check Points or firewalls have the feasibility to display what kind of asset is connected, how many are connected, and what type of device it is, whether it's an IoT device, firewall, switches, printers, laptops, desktops, mobile phones, tablets, or watches. Each type is shown in different dashboards; for example, if 30 laptops are connected, one dashboard shows those 30 laptops, another shows 30 desktops, and another shows the mobile phones connected. This provides a clear understanding and the GUI is user-friendly.

Check Point Security Management has positively impacted my organization by already providing the best opportunities and excellent performance, and there is nothing that needs to be changed; whatever is currently in place is already perfect.

Check Point Security Management has helped my team save time, improve security, and reduce manual work significantly. I've noticed specific outcomes such as the ability to easily identify which device connected has malware installed via the MAC address and what issues have been faced. When a user reaches a bot activity or downloads an unwanted application, the administrator receives a pop-up notification on their phone, allowing swift resolution without any glitches in the internal network.

There is nothing to improve in Check Point Security Management; whatever features are available are already working well.

Everything is functioning actively, and I hope Check Point Security Management continues with this feasibility for a few years unless they introduce a new GUI.

I have been using Check Point Security Management for 1.8 years.

Check Point Security Management is stable at 100%.

Check Point Security Management's scalability is exceptional as it handles growth in users or devices very well; it captures all logs and conveys them in the GUI, making it easy to find solutions.

The customer support rates at five out of 10.

Positive

Before Check Point Security Management, we used Sophos, which was not helping my IT infrastructure, prompting our switch to Check Point Security Management.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Check Point Security Management involves licensing everything available in the Check Point GUI. We have taken all necessary licenses, including antivirus, IPS, and IPsec. The cost is relatively high compared to other brands, but the output we receive justifies the expenditure.

I have seen a return on investment; it's not about saving money as I have spent a lot, but I am getting the output I expect, particularly in terms of saving time from malware, Trojans, and bot activities since adding the licenses.

We did not evaluate other options; we chose Check Point Security Management as our only option.

My advice for others looking into Check Point Security Management is to take multiple demos before committing. Only after the demos are finalized and prove to be effective should one decide to proceed with Check Point Security Management; otherwise, consider other brands.

In addition to being a customer, I am a partner with this vendor.

I rate Check Point Security Management 9 out of 10.

We need central management for our policy, monitoring, and different day-to-day administrative tasks, so Check Point Security Management  fits all the requirements for our needs. As we know, Check Point Security Management  can be used for central policy management. It is an all-in-one management system. We can manage firewalling, application control, URL filtering, IPS, Anti-Bot, and Threat Emulation. We can unify the rule base and reduce it in one central management console called SmartConsole. That is our main use case for this product.

I can use one console for access lists, application control, managing day-to-day reporting, granular access control, managing large and segmented environments with multiple domains or customers, and integrating threat management with that console. It has summed up the tasks in one console, which is our specific use case.

We can manage one firewall in one site, one cluster in one of our sites, and another cluster in another site with a single console. This feature allows us to manage large and sophisticated management tasks in one console, which is why it is called Multi-Domain Security Management.

The granular and general access control allows us to centralize our policy management in one console for firewall, application control, URL filtering, IPS, Anti-Bot, Threat Emulation, and Threat Extraction. It is unified in one console, allowing us to unify the rule base to reduce complexity. These features are beneficial, and the system is scalable.

Administrators are operational, so it creates operational efficiency through faster rollouts of change with policy packages, creating faster and easier operational day-to-day activities.

I strongly admire the compliant support feature. It creates detailed logs, audit trails, and customizable reports. It has excellent reporting features including the threat blades, threat prevention blades, and firewalling blades. I can comply with this and provide it for auditors, which makes it an interesting feature.

Performance with logs needs improvement as Check Point Security Management has large-scale environments that need dedicated log servers. If you store logs on the central management server or Check Point SMS, it will create resource-intensive tasks. When the logs are too heavy for the security management server, the CPU spike will be high, causing our management day-to-day activity to lag or become difficult. This needs to be improved. Additionally, the resource demands need improvement. For example, log indexing related to SmartEvent needs strong servers, which should be improved for the future.

I have been deploying Check Point Security Management products for almost three years.

It is stable for our clients.

It is scalable because it can manage different gateways or different firewalls in different sites. It can be multi-domain Security Management server and can manage large or segmented environments with multiple domains or customers.

For management, we did not use another solution. We just used Cisco ASA  on that single firewall which can be managed through CLI. We switched from Cisco ASA , but that was not management; it was a firewall.

We considered other vendors such as FortiGate and Palo Alto firewalls. We chose Check Point Security Management server because we selected Check Point for our firewall.

I rate Check Point Security Management nine out of ten because it has good features. I decreased one point due to the performance and resource demanding issues on the log indexing, and SmartEvent needs strong servers, which needs to be considered.

It is deployed on-premises and is not costly. The management server can be expensive, but it excels at what it does.

Check Point Security Management server centralizes our policy management by unifying the firewalling features and threat prevention features to manage it in one console. It creates ease and operational efficiency. We save time and increase our day-to-day operational efficiency by removing management complexity.

If you want to centralize your policy management such as firewalling, application control, URL filtering, and different threat prevention features, and unify your rule base to reduce operational complexity, you need to use Check Point Security Management.

My main use case for Check Point Security Management  is as a firewall. I have connected it in my office premises as a firewall. The people who connect to the internet in the internal network have their packet captures go through the firewall itself, ensuring everything is safe and secure.

The best feature Check Point Security Management  offers is the GUI. The GUI shows everything in different categories such as mobile phones, connected devices, laptops, and desktops. It displays everything in different dashboards, making it easy to understand what is connected to what.

Having that dashboard helps me in my day-to-day work because it saves time. It shows all the devices that have been connected and how many devices are connected in different ways. Through this, I am able to track how many laptops and mobile phones have occupied my IP addresses.

If I had to pick one thing that could make my experience even better, I would say they need to change the support resolution time. Everything else meets expectations.

I have been using Check Point Security Management for 1.8 years.

Check Point Security Management is stable in my experience with no downtime.

Regarding scalability, I have given the rating of nine out of ten. The support is the only aspect having a glitch; everything else is satisfactory.

I choose a nine out of ten specifically because sometimes the support has a glitch.

I used a different solution before but prefer not to disclose that name. Currently, there are no issues with anything, and everything is functioning properly.

I have seen a hundred percent return on investment with Check Point Security Management.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Check Point Security Management is positive. The products they provide from Check Point are reasonably priced and satisfactory.

Before choosing Check Point Security Management, I did not evaluate other options. I chose only one option, which is Check Point.

My advice to others looking into using Check Point Security Management is to ask all vendors and customers to take the demo for five to 10 times. After ensuring it is supported by their organizations, then proceed forward. I rate Check Point Security Management a nine out of ten.

My main use case for Check Point Security Management  is that we use it to manage all our firewalls and also look at the logs that the firewalls generate.

I use the logs in Check Point Security Management  both for troubleshooting, seeing traffic from one IP to another IP, and for threat detection, viewing what the IPS and IDS and anti-bot and antivirus generate. It gives a very nice overview where you can see what has happened, when, and what client has generated the logs. It's very easy to get an overview of what's happening in the network.

Check Point Security Management has positively impacted my organization because, after migrating from our previous firewall, a Cisco ASA , we were able to see what traffic was passing through the firewall and from that, build out least access privilege firewall rules. So only what's actually needed by the organization is being let through. The rest is being dropped.

The measurable outcomes with Check Point Security Management show that the troubleshooting is definitely quicker. Now it just takes a few minutes to find out where the error is and resolve it. Before, it was at least an hour or two of troubleshooting to locate the issue.

The best feature Check Point Security Management offers is definitely the log management. I've worked with other firewall vendors and the overview of the logs that you get in Check Point Security Management is superb. You don't get that anywhere else. It's very easy to troubleshoot what traffic is being dropped, what traffic is being passed. It's easy to build firewall rules and everything else. It's miles ahead of anyone else.

Check Point Security Management could definitely improve the lag inside the application. The application has a tendency to get slow when you have a lot of firewall rules inside it. Additionally, it crashes pretty regularly, so they could resolve the stability issues as well.

Regarding the crashes in Check Point Security Management, at least once a day, the application crashes with some random error message. Then you have to close it out and open it up again. The process takes around a minute or two to get back to where you were. It's very frustrating.

I have been using Check Point Security Management for about seven years now.

Check Point Security Management is stable, but the SmartConsole used to administrate the security management is somewhat unstable. The application crashes at least once a day with some random error message. Then you have to close it out and open it up again. The process takes around a minute or two to get back to where you were.

The customer support for Check Point Security Management is great. We have had no issues with them.

I would rate the customer support for Check Point Security Management an eight on a scale of one to 10.

Positive

Before Check Point Security Management, I previously used a Cisco ASA .

I switched from Cisco ASA to Check Point Security Management because the Cisco ASA was standalone and had no central management. We went from that to using Check Point Security Management for centralized management of all of our firewalls.

In terms of return on investment, we definitely need fewer employees to manage the amount of firewalls than before. The time to resolve issues is very much better now with Check Point Security Management.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Check Point Security Management is that the licensing is straightforward. We pay on a three-year base. It's very fair pricing.

Before choosing Check Point Security Management, I did not evaluate other options.

I would definitely give Check Point Security Management a 10 out of 10 because the logging oversight that Check Point Security Management gives is superb compared to anything else I've ever tried.

My advice to others looking into using Check Point Security Management is to definitely talk with Check Point Professional  Services on how to deploy it since creating management of remote sites over VPN can be challenging. Having a plan on how to actually do that is great beforehand.

Overall rating: 10/10

My main use case for Check Point Security Management  is to troubleshoot or add policy, depending on the situation. It could be both, but mainly troubleshooting. We go and take care of the customer's management and resolve issues, create new configurations, and such.

I find very useful the central view offered by Check Point Security Management , as you're able to have all your gateways and policy and different policy packages. The maintenance and addition of new policy is fairly easy. The GUI is also very simple and user-friendly.

The logging feature in Check Point Security Management is effective because the view is one single view and you can have multiple log servers to retrieve the logs from.

The needed improvements in Check Point Security Management depend very much on the customer's infrastructure. For example, an appliance has an easier time than someone with VMs. With VMs, there can be multiple issues related to performance.

I have been working in my current field for around two years.

Since I mainly work on other customers, Check Point Security Management does not much affect my scenario positively, so I cannot provide specific information about deployment issues.

Check Point Security Management has experienced some reliability issues, but it depends on VM, appliance, and any other implementation.

The scalability of Check Point Security Management for a VM depends because you can only enlarge the disk size once and then you probably have to remake it. Also, when you upgrade multiple times, you leave many files that are useless. They are dated, so it's always better to create a new machine every few versions, for example, three or four major versions.

I reach out for help multiple times with Check Point Security Management because many issues are related to the hotfix and known issues or new issues, which we have to work with R&D. The customer support quality varies significantly depending on who you get, what you get, and what the issue is.

I would rate the customer support of Check Point Security Management around a six because recently there's been a decrease in quality.

I am not sure if I previously used a different solution before Check Point Security Management.

I am not aware of the specifics regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Check Point Security Management, but as far as I know, licensing is quite expensive.

My company is not a customer for Check Point Security Management specifically, but we are a partner.

I am not sure if I have seen a return on investment with Check Point Security Management.

I am not aware of the specifics regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Check Point Security Management, but as far as I know, licensing is quite expensive.

I evaluated other options before choosing Check Point Security Management, specifically the Panorama equivalent from Palo Alto Networks.

The challenging part I have experienced with Check Point Security Management has been related to the central licensing. We had some issues where the license got duplicated and it's been a year going around and trying to clean it, but it also made me able to learn multiple things, which included CME and the VSec licensing.

If you have VSec licensing and you add a license that's central, you're going to be able to see it inside the CPMELG file as a VSec common.

I would advise others looking into using Check Point Security Management to put their hands on it. It's easier to learn that way. It's really something you can study, but you're going to be able to know it better when you work on the management itself. At first, people are going to make policy, which is fine. It's the beginning of the CCSA certification. That's the first step.

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

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Check Point Security Management a 7.