CloudGuard WAF-as-a-Service (Advanced/Premium, Contract)

What do you like best about the product?

I like most about Check Point CloudGuard WAF is its seamless integration with cloud environments and the ability to enforce consistent security policies across multiple platforms through a single console. It also provides strong centralized protection and cloud-native integration. The initial setup was relatively simple thanks to the cloud-native integration and automated policy template.

What do you dislike about the product?

One area that could be improved is the initial setup and policy tuning, which can feel complex and time-consuming, especially for teams without deep prior experience with Check Point's ecosystem.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Check Point CloudGuard WAF to protect our cloud-native applications from web attacks, centralize security policy management, automate defense, and solve the challenge of securing distributed cloud applications with unified visibility, automated threat prevention, and simplified compliance management.

What do you like best about the product?

I like the single pane of glass management that Check Point CloudGuard WAF offers, providing consistent policies across all cloud environments. I appreciate how it enforces granular, context-aware security policies across multi-cloud, protecting my cloud-native applications from web exploits and bots. I also find its centralized security management across multi-cloud environments valuable, as it eliminates the complexity of maintaining disparate WAF solutions and stops sophisticated attacks like SQL injection and zero-day exploits. Additionally, I use it with SIEM platforms like Splunk for centralized logging and threat correlation, and I integrate it with CI/CD pipelines such as Jenkins to automate security policy deployment. Overall, it delivers powerful security.

What do you dislike about the product?

The setup and policy tuning have a steep learning curve, and the reporting dashboard could be more intuitive.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Check Point CloudGuard WAF to protect my applications from web exploits and bots, centralize security across multi-cloud environments, and reduce manual effort for consistent compliance.

The major use case is providing application security and API security solutions to the organization. For example, our client was HYG, and they wanted to ensure their applications and API security gets fully secured, which is why I proposed Check Point CloudGuard WAF  to their solution.

The biggest benefit from Check Point CloudGuard WAF  that I saw is that it comes with one solution that completely outperforms its competitors. While there are other vendors such as Azure  or AWS  that provide their own WAF  solution, that is comparatively not good enough. Check Point CloudGuard WAF  prevents everything, their applications, their APIs, protecting them completely from DDoS attacks. It also has an AI feature that learns automatically from patterns, implying remediation to mitigate regular attacks on the network.

Breach reduction occurs when there is a compliance issue or vulnerability within the organization. Since Check Point CloudGuard WAF has the capability to learn itself, as it understands the patterns of risks and attacks, it auto-generates remediation plans by itself, thus effectively reducing breaches on this platform.

The negative side I see is that while most things about Check Point CloudGuard WAF are really good, there is some latency and performance issues, as it can be slow to log in, especially from different regions. The pricing is another concern, as it is on the higher side and more suitable for mid-level or large enterprises rather than small organizations.

The quality of the technical support team could be better; I rate them as okay, not excellent.

To improve support, response time needs attention, as it can be hard to connect with the team. First, one must speak to the level one team, then the case must be transferred to levels two or three, leading to delays due to multiple teams managing different issues. This process means the customer can face delays in getting the right assistance.

Latency and performance issues, friendlier pricing, and support are major concerns for improvement.

I have been working with the products for approximately eight to ten months.

For stability, I would give it 8.5 points out of 10.

Check Point CloudGuard WAF is easy to scale and does not present many challenges, making it very easy to scale without limitation.

The quality of the technical support team could be better; I rate them as okay, not excellent.

Deployment of Check Point CloudGuard WAF is easy, as it comes with different modes depending on the agent that needs to be installed. Overall, it is simple and not very complex.

I observe a good return on investment from the product, as investing in securing clients proves worthy. If a serious breach happens, the cost to fix it could be in the millions, so preventing it is always beneficial for your investment.

There are significant differences, as specifically for Check Point CloudGuard WAF, it outperforms competitors such as Cloudflare  regarding accuracy and remediation. While Cloudflare  is less expensive, it is not completely reliable. In contrast, Check Point CloudGuard WAF, despite being somewhat expensive, is completely reliable.

I was working with Check Point CloudGuard WAF as a service provider, providing support to our clients from the Check Point CloudGuard WAF point.

When I assess the efficiency improvements provided by Check Point CloudGuard WAF compared to traditional WAF, I find that in traditional WAFs, we had to purchase a physical device or license from companies such as F5 or Cloudflare, which were really good in the market. However, since it has moved to the cloud, it completely goes virtual, meaning you don't have to buy or manage your own physical devices, making implementation really easy and very efficient with just a one-time purchase of the license from Check Point CloudGuard WAF.

Integration capability with existing systems was easy, as all vendors these days, such as Check Point, Fortinet, and Cisco, provide everything inbuilt. If you use the same vendor's firewall or EDR, it is easier to integrate their tool rather than purchasing from different vendors, which can become complex and challenging for engineers. When it is from the same vendor, managing different solutions is having only one platform to log in to.

Check Point CloudGuard WAF absolutely helps reduce the false positive rate, which is really very good, as the false positive rate is very low. The approximate false positive rate is one percent.

In assessing the solution for preemptively blocking zero-day attacks and detecting hidden anomalies, I find Check Point CloudGuard WAF amazing because it works on two engines: supervised and unsupervised. For zero-day attacks, it resolves issues immediately without waiting for another 24 hours or seven days.

I would rate the pricing at seven points, indicating it is expensive. I would rate this review overall as an 8 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

What do you like best about the product?

I greatly appreciate the machine learning engine of Check Point CloudGuard WAF for prevention, because it automates much of the complex work of rule management, drastically reducing false positives. I don't have to write custom rules from scratch and the policies adapt well to real traffic after the initial learning period. Additionally, I like the security policy updates that come from the cloud without me having to intervene manually. The preemptive bot protection is very effective, clearly distinguishing between good and malicious bots, and the automatic API discovery is convenient for mapping APIs and detecting unprotected endpoints. The unified console for policy management across different environments, cloud and on-prem, is very useful to avoid maintaining separate stacks.

What do you dislike about the product?

The management console could be improved; sometimes you have to click too many times to find specific information, and the logging system is not granular enough during troubleshooting. The documentation lacks concrete examples for real use cases, and more practical troubleshooting support would be helpful. Integration with Splunk requires writing custom parsing, and support for configuration as code has room for improvement.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Check Point CloudGuard WAF manages false positives using machine learning, better protecting APIs and reducing bot traffic. It unifies management on cloud and on-premises, simplifying work compared to the past, but the management console has room for improvement.