CloudGuard constantly monitors cloud systems for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit. Many processes associated with cloud security management, such as asset detection, risk assessment, and remediation, are automated by CloudGuard. This allows security teams to concentrate on more strategic efforts. CloudGuard is intended to assist organizations in securing their cloud environments by continuously monitoring and analyzing cloud setups for misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance violations.
CloudGuard CNAPP
Check Point Software TechnologiesExternal reviews
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Great asset detection, risk assessment, and remediation processes
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
Many of the duties associated with maintaining cloud security are automated by CloudGuard, including asset detection, risk assessment, and remediation.
In addition to improving compliance, this frees up security personnel to concentrate on more strategic initiatives and enables organizations to adhere to industry standards and laws like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR.
It offers security advice and insights to assist organizations in acting quickly to address concerns. It also has automated remediation capabilities to address found problems and automatically enact security policies.
What is most valuable?
The asset detection, risk assessment, and remediation processes are only a few of the duties that CloudGuard automates while managing cloud security. This improves compliance, enables organizations to adhere to industry standards and laws like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR, and frees up security personnel to concentrate on more strategic objectives.
It offers security insights and recommendations to assist organizations in acting and remediating issues swiftly. It also has automated remediation capabilities to address found issues and automatically enforce security policies.
What needs improvement?
Compliance checks on cloud resources against various industry standards and compliance framework templates need to be improved, to ensure that organizations meet regulatory requirements with clear visibility action controls. This can make it difficult to create and manage custom security policies.
Cloud security posture management is a proprietary solution, which means that there is no open-source community to support it. This can make it difficult to get help with troubleshooting and other issues.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been adopting the solution for more than a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
CloudGuard is known for being highly scalable and reliable. It handles big cloud workloads with ease and may be implemented in complex cloud infrastructures.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In terms of cloud solutions, the scalability was a fairly simple and entirely software-driven approach.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support is good and offers regularly updated new features and security patches. This ensures that CloudGuard is always protected against the most advanced threats.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We adopted our cloud journey last year, and while developing the cloud, we took all security precautions. CSPM was a priority solution, and we have apt.
How was the initial setup?
We implemented CSPM in 30 days. Since the solution was simple to implement and the transition was painless, we added many of our cloud environments.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented the solution through a partner.
What was our ROI?
CloudGuard's return on investment (ROI) varies based on the organization and its cloud environment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
CSPM is an invaluable resource for any organization that makes use of cloud computing. It can assist organizations in improving their cloud security posture, reducing the risk of cyberattacks, and adhering to industry norms and regulations.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evolved various CSPM tools such as PAN, TRELIX, and Fortinet, however, our management opted to install CloudGuard as a strategic step.
What other advice do I have?
CloudGuard provides a comprehensive set of security solutions for cloud environments.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
A good next-generation firewall with helpful filtering but needs better support
What is our primary use case?
We have a hybrid environment so we use Check Point Cloud Guard to protect the cloud workload. On-prem, we are already using the Check Point Firewalls so we can manage both environment firewalls using the same management server, AKA the smart console, which saves time and effort to look for logs during any type of troubleshooting. It helps us avoid creating the same objects for each firewall but also provides a single pane of glass through which we can see all gateways, logs, policies, objects, user management, and traffic tracing.
How has it helped my organization?
It is a next-generation firewall that helps a lot in many ways to protect my workloads from threats, such as:
- firewall blade providing protection at Layer 3 and 4
- application filtering blade providing protection from unauthorized applications or services
- URL filtering providing protection on malicious URLs based on various categories as updated by Check Point on a daily basis
- threat prevention and sandboxing capability to actually help with unknown or zero-day threats (it tests, removes the malicious content, and then releases or blocks by itself)
Overall, it provides good security.
What is most valuable?
The threat extraction and emulation module is a savior for us from unknown threats. We know that daily millions of new threats emerge over the internet so we like that it provides protection from them all. It's good to have a sandboxing environment that can first assess the threat before releasing it to the production environment. These threats are called zero-day threats for which there is no signature or update available whether it be on an endpoint, machine, antivirus solution, or other software. Therefore, it becomes very useful to use this feature to stop threats from spreading right at the gateway itself.
What needs improvement?
Their service needs improvement. Their vendor doesn't provide good support. Also, there is no way to escalate it to Check Point so that Check Point can take action against their partner. I don't have direct support with Check Point. We have collaborative support with one of the Check Point partners who do not provide good support. When we reached out to Check Point to escalate; they denied taking any action against the vendor.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for five years.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
A product that performs well and enables users to control the information that goes out of their company
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution to control all the emails that go out from the company. We also use it to protect our network by stopping unauthorized people from accessing it.
What is most valuable?
The product enables us to check the information that goes out of the company. We get to know if someone sends our sales emails to our competitors. We control the information that goes out of the company. It’s a good product.
What needs improvement?
The product must provide different features like antivirus.
For how long have I used the solution?
I am currently using the solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The tool always performs very well. All the upgrades happen automatically. We haven't had a problem with it.
How are customer service and support?
We haven’t needed much support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The solution’s pricing is a little bit high. I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is the lowest price, and ten is the highest price.
What other advice do I have?
I would like to implement all the security solutions from Check Point in our company. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.
Provides a unified platform, no agents required, and has good visibility
What is our primary use case?
Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management is utilized to monitor our various cloud-related portals on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and other platforms. This solution offers a unified console to manage all the servers and provide us with comprehensive details.
How has it helped my organization?
We can automate certain aspects of our security through Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management. However, complete automation is not possible due to the dependencies of the applications installed in the cloud VMs.
The agentless workload posture enhances the compatibility of our VMs since there's no requirement to install any agents or assign write permissions. This approach also simplifies management, reduces the need for multiple levels of approvals, and eliminates the necessity of installing anything on our servers.
Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management saves us time by enabling communication with all of our devices within a span of two days.
CloudGuard Posture Management's unified platform has saved our organization time when dealing with our cloud environment.
What is most valuable?
The visibility in our cloud environment is the most valuable feature.
What needs improvement?
We have concerns regarding the pricing and would appreciate seeing some improvements.
For how long have I used the solution?
We are currently conducting a POC with Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management and have been testing it for one month.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would give the stability an eight out of ten.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support is good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price is on the higher end.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Easy to manage, great visibility, all from a single dashboard
What is our primary use case?
We utilize Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management to gain visibility into our cloud environments and their configurations. The cloud services we employ include AWS, Azure, and GCP.
How has it helped my organization?
A while back, we deployed Kubernetes, and it was exposed to the internet, resulting in the environment being affected by malware. Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management has helped our organization prevent such attacks from occurring in our environment.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is the single dashboard that enables us to manage the entire cloud environment from one place.
What needs improvement?
The dashboard customization has room for improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management is highly stable. There was only one instance when the solution experienced downtime.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support is good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management is expensive.
What other advice do I have?
I give Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management a ten out of ten.
Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management is an important component of a cloud environment that enables us to gain visibility across all areas and configure easily. I highly recommend this solution.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Has great support and helped us analyze the security of our Azure environment
What is our primary use case?
We use Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management to increase our visibility into our environment and ensure that our policies are being followed.
How has it helped my organization?
The solution has helped us analyze the security of our Azure environment. Trend Micro and Check Point analyze the Azure environment with our tenants and clients to check for security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. We need to correct these problems and alert our team and clients of any issues. The solution also compares these actions between two applications.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is the separate environment. In the testing environment, we can have Client A, Client B, and Client C. We can check this information in one portal. It is possible to separate access to this information for my clients to review.
What needs improvement?
The license cost is expensive and has room for improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management for three months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I give the stability a nine out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I give the scalability a nine out of ten.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support is great.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The license fee is high.
What other advice do I have?
I give Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management a ten out of ten.
Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management is a good solution and I recommend it.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Cost-effective, and stable, but the solution should provide a single integrated view
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution to protect workloads and users on the cloud, including both internal and external users. The solution must monitor user roles, the overall posture of the cloud application, and database and web servers that are exposed to the internet. It is an improvement over the default Amazon AWS security posture because it is sensitive to the context in which the application is being used, such as whether it is being used by a public user or an internal user who is managing the system on the cloud.
How has it helped my organization?
We used on-premises solutions until recently. However, we are now moving to the cloud for all of our applications. Posture management tools are now essential, and we must have them, regardless of whether they are from Tenable, Check Point, CrowdStrike, or another vendor. This solution is cost-effective, so we chose it, but we may change it in the future.
What is most valuable?
Embedded machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide in-line real-time attack prevention is most valuable. This is because analytics and machine learning capabilities come much later. In a high-volume situation, things can go bad quickly. Therefore, an in-line alert mechanism is much better than any other.
Visibility is the most important part. On the cloud, shared resources can make it difficult to see all of the resources that are deployed. This solution helps to keep everything visible, and it also alerts us if something is wrong, such as if someone opened extra ports or services that they are not supposed to. This is a valuable tool for monitoring and maintaining our cloud environment.
The solution is also capable of controlling resources, but this is a highly controversial and context-aware area. If the platform takes too much control, it could potentially stop our applications from working. Therefore, we limit its use to monitoring and visibility only.
What needs improvement?
Check Point must provide a multi-cloud facility where AWS, Azure, and GCP can seamlessly work together and display posture in an integrated manner. Instead of showing separate AWS, Azure, and GCP environments, the solution should provide a single integrated view. This will make it easier to decide which issues to fix first and will reduce the amount of technical work required.
Check Point is always adding new features. However, we are sometimes confused about how to use the features that are already available. There are so many features and we are unable to use all of them.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have only been using Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management for a very short time, not even a year yet. Earlier, we were not using the cloud very much, so there was no need for such a product. However, after we shifted a few of our applications to the cloud, we started using the solution.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution has been quite stable for the past year. However, I cannot say how it will behave in the future, as it may experience a bigger load and a wider variety of workloads. The stability of the solution is subjective and will depend on the specific environment in which it is used.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have not yet tested the solution at that scale. It is just a starting point. We may add more applications and more load to it. We will have to see how scalable the solution is.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support is good. They sometimes call people from outside India to help us, because we are longtime Check Point customers. We have been using their hardware, software, and firewalls for about two decades. This solution is a new addition to our support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We are still using a variety of firewall solutions, including Juniper and Cisco, throughout our organization. As a government organization, we are required to purchase the cheapest option available. Therefore, we must utilize the solution that is the most affordable in each case.
How was the initial setup?
I am involved in the deployment of the solution. I am not the technical hands-on person for this project. I manage the deployment process.
What was our ROI?
It is very difficult to measure the return on investment for security measures. Security is not an investment in the traditional sense, as it does not generate direct revenue. Instead, security is a safety measure, similar to insurance. As such, it is difficult to quantify the ROI of security measures.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It is difficult to contextualize the pricing because we are used to Indian pricing and licensing. In India, there is very little interaction with North America and the private sector regarding pricing.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated all the firewalls including Juniper and Cisco.
What other advice do I have?
I give Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management a seven out of ten.
The solution claims to provide a unified platform that integrates all security capabilities. However, there are on-premises issues, cloud issues, and hybrid issues that make this impossible. No tool can ever provide such capability.
We are not a small office. Therefore, I have no experience with how the solution helps small offices. However, for us, the solution only helps us with our cloud posture management. We still use different tools on-premises. And maybe in the future, we will go directly to the cloud.
I have doubts about the value of looking for the cheapest or fastest firewall. There is always someone who is coming out with a new product that is faster or cheaper than the current one. However, it is important to consider the overall security capabilities of a firewall, not just its speed or price. A firewall that is slower because it is doing more analytics may actually be more secure than a faster firewall that does not do as much analysis. The best firewall for you will depend on your specific needs and requirements.
This is my first time at an RSA conference, and I find it very confusing. There are too many vendors, too many products, and too much to see. I only had a few hours to visit today, and it was overwhelming. I think the conference would be better if it were split into two or three parts, with one part focused on the Asia Pacific and another part focused on North America. Most of the vendors here are focused on North America, so it would be helpful to have a dedicated space for vendors from Asia Pacific. I will try to visit the RSA conference in Singapore next year, and I hope it will be more manageable.
The RSA does not impact our cybersecurity solution purchases. The Indian government's procurement process is completely independent of vendors and their products. Our purchases are based on our needs and requirements, and the solutions must be supported in India.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Provides detailed information, and is stable, but the rules are not well-tuned
What is our primary use case?
We review CloudGuard results and generate tickets to contact the owners.
How has it helped my organization?
Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management will improve the organization. Currently, it is operating as a stopgap measure to address these issues. This is because there are a lot of them being generated. They are working on automation to automatically create tickets and track when issues are remediated. So, hopefully, when that comes into play, it will be a much more valuable tool.
What is most valuable?
The ability to drill down to individual hosts on an account and see which ones are affected is valuable. This is because we have a lot of cases where people remediate part of the solution on half of their hosts, but don't realize that they have more hosts that need to be addressed.
What needs improvement?
The rules are not well-tuned, and many of them generate false positives or nonsensical results. For example, they might flag port 443 as open, even though it is supposed to be open for a public web server. There needs to be a better way to exclude certain hosts that are compliant and are supposed to be open.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management for three months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution has not crashed yet, and there are a lot of findings, so that is a good sign of its stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution is able to handle a large number of vulnerabilities, so it seems to be able to scale well.
What was our ROI?
We've only been using the solution for a few months, but we're already starting to see the numbers go down. This is encouraging, but it's important to be aware of any vulnerabilities that may exist so that we can take steps to address them.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'm glad I don't have to pay the licensing fee. Everything in this field is very expensive. I don't have a say in the matter.
What other advice do I have?
I give Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management a six out of ten. It could be better once fully tuned and properly deployed.
My usage is rather difficult because the client has not spent much time tuning the solution, as they are planning to automate a lot of it. As a result, I am currently the manual.
The solution actually created more work for the staff because it made them aware of all the vulnerabilities. As a result, their priority is now to fix them, which created a lot of work and a lot of tickets.
I wish I had been involved in the deployment because I would have done it differently.
At the RSA conference, we receive a lot of promotional items.
The RSA conference does not impact our organization's cybersecurity purchases.
Flexible with a good audit trail and blocking capabilities
What is our primary use case?
We started to use Check Point as a firewall. That's what it was for. Now we use it for all the endpoint security, cloud security, and API endpoint security. That's probably our major use case.
How has it helped my organization?
The solution has improved our organization by allowing us to be more flexible and deploy changes much more quickly. Since it gives us an audit trail, it's much easier for us to track or change things.
What is most valuable?
The feature that I find most valuable is the blocking feature. When we have to block something, the screens we have in front of us are really good. They are very user-friendly, and the processes are quick. That's something we've really liked from the beginning.
What needs improvement?
Especially with cloud security, there's too much clutter on the screen and too many things going on.
In a future release, we'd like to have the ability to see if there is abnormal data being transferred. We'd like to see more features coming through that allow us to act more proactively and act against vulnerabilities effectively.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for a long time. I've been with my company for more than ten years, and over that time, I've been using it. We've been using Check Point from on-premises deployments to the cloud.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have not witnessed any crashing.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution works well for us, both on-premises and on the cloud.
How are customer service and support?
The support has always been the best.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We've used the solution for ten years. I'm not sure what we used before.
How was the initial setup?
I was not a part of the initial setup.
What was our ROI?
We have seen an ROI in terms of flexibility and ease of use.
What other advice do I have?
The solution is very easy to use. We've used it for a long time. Our team is very familiar with it. Different people, even with different responsibilities, can share. It has helped us free up staff time.
I'd rate the solution a ten out of ten.
The ability to prioritize alerts enables me to focus on critical issues instead of common misconfigurations
What is our primary use case?
CloudGuard is a tool for evaluating the health and configuration of an account. We primarily use it for AWS, but we also use it for Azure. I also use it for inventory and historical reporting.
We work with 50 AWS accounts. Four teams across a couple of time zones use CloudGuard. Our security and DevOps teams are the primary users, but the support team occasionally uses it. Management consumes the output and the reports. I think it makes them feel good, so that's nice.
How has it helped my organization?
I recently transitioned into a management and architecture role. CloudGuard helped me delegate to my engineers the day-to-day tasks of operational care and feeding and health assessments of the environments. I previously spent more time building rules and implementing automatic remediations. Now, I let it fly, and my engineers operate it.
I helped with the design and build, and I was originally in charge of the run. I've now handed off the run, which enabled me to do more. I think it helped those guys to be effective and do more. I'd say it freed up the equivalent of a quarter to an eighth of an FTE.
CloudGuard allows us to scale. As we bring on customers, more accounts come online, and more platforms are deployed in our environment, I don't have to scale my team linearly with the growth of our product. These rules work over and over on the number of accounts. I think that's a place where it will help us as our customer base grows.
The security operations team saved some time. I'm on the team, so I do a lot with this. It's one of the essential tools. Depending on the incident, Check Point can be extremely helpful in understanding the configuration. I use it ad hoc or tactically in those conditions. At the same time, other operations or security incidents are out of view of Check Point and Dome9, so it doesn't come into play. When the problem is at the account or configuration level, it makes remediation and troubleshooting an investigation easier.
It saves time because I can look across the organization. Instead of checking 50 different accounts atomically and spending 15 minutes investigating each, I can spend 15 minutes exploring all 50 accounts. It allows me to quickly look across the org for similar problems when one comes up. That's a huge time saver.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is the ability to create a reference rule set and use that to evaluate an account's health. It provides daily reports on any drift from that rule set and real-time alerts. Some of the automated remediations are also helpful.
I like the GSL Builder, which helped us reduce human error. It helps answer a question quickly in real-time that I might not want to put into a specific rule that I evaluate across all my accounts all the time. In many cases, we've built rules that we consider everywhere for the posture of all our essential accounts. However, I often work on an issue or question, and I just want to see who has this configuration or misconfiguration. GSL Builder lets me quickly locate all the S3 buckets with a faulty configuration. I use it tactically like that sometimes.
I'd be sad if it went away. However, you couldn't throw an inexperienced person at it and expect them to get any value from it without some handholding or spending time to read the documentation and think about it. You must know about the asset you interrogate to write a good rule or to do a good evaluation. That isn't a Check Point problem, but it's a general issue in cloud security.
CloudGuard offers several pre-packaged rules for various evaluations, such as NIST, 853, etc. I went through them, found 50 rules I think are handy, and put them into a custom rule set. Then, I spent time writing about 30 rules specific to my environment. I use those to evaluate the health of my accounts continuously.
We check health insurer information because all this data is highly confidential and protected by HIPAA. We use these rules to evaluate our cloud properties constantly. I can't imagine the time that would take to perform this kind of evaluation by hand or using another tool. That's why we have Check Point.
There are many auto-remediations available. We use a few and wrote a couple of our own. It's an excellent risk management tool. We use it because we're so paranoid about the security of our environment. I've used this tool at other companies in different industries, and they've been apprehensive about automatic remediation. It depends on the part of the world you live in. I use it, and it stopped problems, so I've gotten tremendous value from auto-remediation.
The ability to prioritize alerts has been handy. It enables me to focus on critical issues instead of common misconfiguration. The visibility into my workloads is pretty good but not great. I don't use it at a granular level. I'm primarily focused on protecting my overall cloud posture and the health of the account with CloudGuard, but I also look for some common misconfigurations that might be workload-induced.
What needs improvement?
Making basic rules is easy, but it's complex if you want to do something a little more nuanced. I've been unable to make some rules that I wanted. I couldn't evaluate some values or parameters of the components I look for. I haven't always been able to assess them.
It feels like some attributes of resources can't be interrogated through the GSL the way I would like. For example, I wanted to figure out all the systems launched with a particular image that had been running for 31 days or more. Until I talked to the Dome9 people and the support team, I didn't understand how to frame that query in GSL. The support team told me how to do it, but I couldn't figure it out alone. The documentation is a little unclear about how to do some of those configurations. More tutorials and examples on the blogs and support pages would be helpful.
I had another problem when we tried to encrypt all of our storage volumes. There is a feature called batch jobs or Elastic MapReduce jobs. CloudGuard sometimes can't detect the encryption status of the underlying disks of those systems that process my workloads. It pops up with a bunch of alerts that say, "Non-encrypted volumes have been found in your account."
Those jobs are dynamic, so they spin up, run for an hour or two, and all the systems are destroyed. By the time I checked it, all the systems were gone. CloudGuard threw a bunch of alerts in the middle of the night when all these things happened, and I went back to evaluate the configuration. I know they were all encrypted because I can see how it was deployed. It didn't have a great insight into my actual workload, but it generally tells me when people launch unencrypted things. It isn't perfect, but it's okay.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used CloudGuard for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
CloudGuard has been solidly stable. I'd say nearly perfect.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
CloudGuard's scalability is decent. They're switching to a new onboarding methodology that I'm not in love with, but I think we'll find a way to make it work and continue to scale. It has been good.
How are customer service and support?
I rate Check Point's support an eight out of ten. I've contacted them with a few questions or issues and always had good support experiences with them. I'm not a huge customer paying millions of dollars a year. I work for a small startup on the bleeding edge of technology, and I feel like Check Point and Dome9 meet me where I am.
It wasn't trying to shove a network firewall, like a data center security tool, down my throat. Palo Alto and Check Point are old-school network security appliance vendors that are out of their depth in cloud security, so they bought tools like bought Twistlock and Dome9. Check Point's acquisition and management of Dome9 have been excellent. I can still talk to people at Dome9 and get support for this tooling, but it has been difficult for me to do that with their competitors.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I've used Palo Alto Prisma Cloud, but I've also used Palo Alto's Cloud Security Posture Management tooling. I prefer Check Point, which is why we have it.
I still have both solutions, but I use Palo Alto for something else. I use Twistlock, a Prisma Cloud module, for runtime protection of containerized workloads. I also use Dome9 for CSPM. I did not like using Prisma Cloud for CSPM because I did not care for the rule language or configuration.
Also, I feel like Check Point, and Dome9 listen to their users. If I'm dying for a new feature to improve the solution, they would hear me out and consider it. I guarantee you that Palo Alto doesn't care.
How was the initial setup?
Deploying CloudGuard is straightforward. I deployed it and configured the auto-remediation alone, but I also worked with another architect to discuss the design and workshop some ideas, so we could say a team of two deployed it.
After deployment, maintenance has been very low.
What was our ROI?
We've seen a return. It still makes sense to write a check. I can't imagine going back to doing it the way I did before. It's essential for my compliance program to have this tool in place. If I could save the $100,000 or more I pay annually and use cloud-native tools, the additional time I would spend tuning and doing everything I'm doing with CloudGuard wouldn't be worth it, at least not in the first year.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
CloudGuard is fairly priced.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management an eight out of ten. I advise new users to start with a defined list of goals or problems and implement the solution in a way that initially prioritizes their most significant issues or primary goals. Don't try to boil the ocean. In other words, don't enable all the features and do everything at once. They will be overloaded unless they know what they're doing. Go feature by feature, function by function, and area by area. Determine where your critical risks are and implement the solution based on that knowledge.
I think there are some benefits to using a third-party tool. For example, these tools might simplify and enrich features or offer focus. You're adding another view or pane of glass to your security world, but once you start to look across clouds, it becomes interesting. I have to write all my own rules for Azure and AWS. At the same time, I can get the same report delivered to my inbox that I can then feed to my executives, showing them the health of these cloud properties.
It looks cohesive and coherent instead of using separate native tools for AWS, GCP, Alibaba, and Azure and trying to compile all those reports and metrics. At least I can distill my posture into a commonsense readable score and transmit that to the executives. I can tell them, "Our posture's at 98% compliance." They can comprehend that and compare the scores from week to week. It helps me from a reporting angle.