With Security Management solution, we can manage and distribute security policies to firewall gateways. In large environment where there are dozens of Check Point appliances from Headquarter to branches, I deployed the Security Management with thousands of rules for an enterprise. I created different security packages for each gateway/cluster pair for administration purpose while maintaining separation and ease of policy installation. With every change request, we just need to configure the relating package and install to right gateways. Besides log dashboard in smartconsole is very useful and convenient for monitoring and tracking. It provides intuitive interface to search log, operation to filter is very to understand
With Check Point Security Management, we can:
- Manage and configure cluster for Check Point Gateways. Define security zones (internal, dmz, external) on interfaces.
- Add, modify, delete security rules, objects and install to gateways.
- Activate or de-activate blades like Mobile Access, IPS, URL Filtering, Application Control, Identity Awareness, Antivirus,... to the selected gateways and configure the security settings on them.
- Track and monitor security logs.
- send commands to the Management API. Supporting Management API helps automated tasks for daily operation or integrate with third-party solution SIEM/SOAR.
The most valuable feature is Management API. It has been supported since R80 and above. Why? For firewall administrators who handle many tasks daily on not only Check Point systems. They are flooded with their boring manual tasks but always got stuck with request tickets. For security analysts who work with numerous logs from many sources and take actions to stop attacks. Can analysist and protection be highly effective if they must take much time in implementing policies? All limitations above can be solved with Check Point Management API. The administrators can automate and improve their productivity in operation by scripting. The security analysts can immediately apply security settings on the firewall while saving their time and concentrate on their research job. This feature is very useful and Check Point works great job to support many security aspects with easy-to-understand guide.
In complex environment, the Security Management system manages many firewall gateways. There are thousands of security rules in the server and there are also other security settings about Check Point blades. Database in the server becomes large. Hence installing policy takes very long time to complete. Imagine that the administrators must process their daily tickets. They make configuration changes in Smart Console of Management Server for the first ticket, and while waiting for installation completion, then they receive the second ticket, a critical case, what should they do? This is only one of the situations that the administrators are facing in operation. Hope that Check Point can improve the processing time of installation.
Check Point TAC team is very professional.
Only manage Check Point gateways by using Check Point Management Server. I used other firewall vendors like Cisco, Fortinet but Check Point is much better about stability and performance. So using central management for Check Point is best choice.
I always implement by myself because it's very easy to implement.