Check Point IPS Reviews

We first saw that this blade was available to use in our Check Point gateway. Later, we understood that there are advanced threats that are in charge of exposing weaknesses. We did not have our perimeter completely covered, which is why we decided to use this technology.

This technology helps us to detect and prevent attempts at exploiting vulnerabilities. It also helps a lot as the tool poses very few false positives, giving the tool good credibility.

Check Point IPS has helped us to have greater perimeter security through our Check Point Gateway. It offers us an easy implementation and has great protection across our infrastructure.

By means of Smart Events, we can carry out very advanced monitoring of the threats that have tried to enter our infrastructure.

It is a great tool. It is totally recommended by us. It really covers many areas of security, such as anti-malware, data loss, improper use of protocols, and preventing known exploits.                             

One of the characteristics that we liked the most is the functionality and easy implementation via the Check Point Gateway.

The cost is reduced to being a blade. That is a good detail of the product in terms of licensing.

Protection in real-time is very good. It helps us detect things on time and make decisions to improve perimeter security.

Also, a very good feature is the optional mode of putting it only in detection mode. They are ensuring in that sense that they are not so intrusive at the beginning of the implementation in production environments.

Sometimes Check Point documentation is not always updated, which is why when some implementations change, it generates confusion about details. In addition to extending some implementations, it would be good for Check Point to keep its documentation public and updated.

This product, as a blade, does not include the license with the Check Point gateway.

Some errors are generated in the implementation of the Smart Cloud in the Infinity Check Point Portal. When that happens, cases of withdrawal must be carried out without embargo for a long time in response.

We have been using this solution for about two years and have received the expected results. We are satisfied with the product.

Previously we did not use another brand or tool. This is our primary solution now.

We did evaluate other options. It is always important to evaluate various options to see how they adapt to the client's system and infrastructure.

We recommend the product. It is highly safe and easy to use.

I use Check Point IPS to prevent attacks, such as malware, spyware, and any other malicious activity.

What I like best about Check Point IPS is that it can prevent attacks. I also like that it has a log feature.

The hardware-based version of Check Point IPS could be more scalable. Right now, it's not scalable.

I've been working with Check Point IPS for two to three years.

Stability-wise, Check Point IPS is eight out of ten.

Check Point IPS is a scalable solution if it's cloud-based, but if it's hardware-based, it isn't scalable. Scalability-wise, it's a six out of ten.

The Check Point IPS technical support is excellent portal-wise and callback-wise, so it's a nine out of ten.

Positive

Setting up Check Point IPS is straightforward.

Before I deploy Check Point IPS, I'll put it on IDS mode, and then I'll see the current user activity, any malicious activity, and the logs. I then switch to the IPS mode.

You can pay for Check Point IPS yearly, or you can go with a three-year license. There's no extra cost apart from the standard licensing fee.

My company has two hundred users of Check Point IPS.

I recommend Check Point IPS to others because it's scalable, reliable, and easily managed by all users.

My rating for Check Point IPS is eight out of ten.

We have a hybrid infrastructure with an on-premise data center, cloud data center, and multiple branch offices. All of these firewalls are managed via Check Point Multi Domain Management as well as Smart Event to see security events across our environment.

IPS is set primarily to prevent and only some signatures are set to detect (only after some false positives) so we still see them and get notifications via the Smart Event reports.

IPS is updated automatically and pushed to all gateways every two hours. 

Check Point's IPS simply works and is continuously kept up-to-date on all gateways. Via the management, it's possible to let the gateway update the IPS signatures itself, instead of letting the management update itself and then push the updates to the gateways.

If there's a new data center or branch office and everything is still in the test phase, it's possible to set the IPS policy to detect only so you can gather data and create a baseline without completely disabling IPS. That way, you can still see log entries.

Automatic updates can be done either via management or the Gateway itself, without any user interaction. The gateway is up-to-date with the newest signatures.

If you're unsure which profile to use, Check Point has some pre-defined profiles according to its best practices. Each one adds a different load to the relevant gateway, so you have to first check the current load and then decide on the right profile.

IPS signatures can be set quite granularly depending on your environment. You can filter on performance impact, severity, and confidence which makes sizing and adapting easier.

You can't turn off IPS completely as there are some signatures that are set even without activated IPS. If you know that, you can act accordingly. But sometimes you have to do a general exception instead of a granular one.

There are always some false positives with non-RFC traffic. This is good for security, however, it will cause some effort in day-to-day business as there will have to be exceptions for certain applications.

Threat Prevention policies are not very easily manageable as there are several profiles/policies/etc. Therefore, there are several ways to add exceptions and check the configuration.

I've used the solution for over ten years.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability is quite good, depending on which IPS profile you're using.

The solution is easy to set up.

The solution's IPS functionality and firewall functionality are the solution's most valuable features.

The detection needs improvement. We fear that it doesn't detect everything that we want to see.

The solution needs enhanced reporting. The reporting on Cisco Stealthwatch and Darktrace is much bigger. The visibility that they grant for the filtering capabilities over large infrastructures are far superior.

The stability of the solution is good. We've never had any issues.

Scalability is very good. 

We run a very large network. It was really easy to cover the full traffic flow. We just don't know about the reporting aspect - on whether it sees all the traffic that we want to capture. I'm unsure if we will increase usage in the near future as we're currently moving away from the product.

Technical support is okay. I'd rate it seven out of ten. Our biggest complaint is that they are rather slow.

We weren't previously using a different product.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

We're still in the process of evaluating options. We're doing a POC with Cisco and Darktrace and are moving away from Check Point.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

My primary use case for Check Point IPS is very simple: I first identify some signature behaviors and secure levels and then I apply some signatures. I usually do not deploy IPS from CheckPoint. Overall, I manage signatures.

The Check Point IPS feature I find the most valuable is the firewall. It is great and easy to work with. 

I'm not sure what I really like in IPS because it's automated. You read the permit and you try to apply the signature and read the behavior of the solution and find how to fix it. So I don't think Check Point IPS is a great solution. 

I don't I like working with it very much because there's other stuff you can do to have more information. However, Check Point IPS does prevent important attacks easily.

What I would like to improve in IPS would be the capacity of the hardware. I would also like to be able to sort signatures by severity. This would greatly impact how well I can manage my environment. 

In the next release, I would like to see automatic signature deployment. 

I have been using Check Point IPS for nearly a year now. 

On a scale of one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Check Point IPS an eight. 

We are using Check Point IPS for securing our internal networks and our website, as well as all of the traffic that goes through us. The traffic is analyzed by the IPS, which checks for things like malicious files and different attack patterns.

We are using the virtualized version.

Our old IPS was much more difficult to administer so the adoption of Check Point has helped us in this regard.

The most valuable feature is ease of use.

Check Point IPS has quite a decent database of attacks.

The reports are well written so that you can understand what type of attack has occurred, the originating IP address, and other details.

It is always possible to improve the speed of an IPS, although there is always a performance penalty when using additional security software.

Occasionally there are glitches and errors like false positives, which would be a nice area of this solution to improve upon.

The pricing could be improved.

I have been using Check Point IPS for six or seven years.

The stability is quite good. The product itself is quite good and although we had some issues, they were usually hardware related. Since we upgraded to the virtual edition two or three years ago, we have had almost no incidents. 

We do not have a very big scale so I cannot comment on scalability. The performance is enough for us and to test scale, you would need a bigger connection speed. We have a 500 megabit internet connection and it is almost never saturated. We have tested ours and it works well. The only time we hit a bottleneck is when we are transferring large amounts of data or creating many connections, but that is not our typical use case.

We have 205 employees and they are all protected by Check Point IPS. They are all end-users except for our one system administrator. We do not plan on increasing our usage at this point.

With Check Point, we have had quite good support. They usually respond within two or three days with some kind of resolution or at least they collect logs and analyze them.

Most of our cases are solved with first-level support, which is local. They are our partner who sells this product and they have their own technical people who know our infrastructure. We generally do not need to escalate our issues to Check Point.

Prior to using Check Point IPS, we were using a solution by IBM. It was much more difficult to administer. However, we had already been using the Check Point Firewall product and moving to Check Point IPS was a logical choice. It was easier in terms of administration because it is the same console and we did not need additional servers. In fact, our infrastructure got a little bit smaller and the performance, I would say, is better.

With respect to the performance, having the solutions on the same machine means that the traffic is analyzed once instead of twice. There are fewer hops.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We had to add the license and enable the policies, which was done within two days. After that, of course, we had some fine-tuning but I wouldn't say that it's a headache. In total, it took about a month before we had the configuration ready and it was in production.

One person was responsible for the deployment and one person is enough to take care of maintenance.

We had some trouble doing all of the troubleshooting and setting up some of our rules, so we had assistance from technical support during this part of the setup. We took care of the main deployment but they guided us when necessary.

It is difficult to calculate ROI for an IPS or a firewall because you can actually live without fancy security if you don't have any data to protect.

This is an expensive solution. I am not exactly sure of the pricing because we have a package deal that has the licenses included. I think that the price of support is around $40,000 USD or $50,000 USD per year.

How it works is that we license a pair of virtual CPU cores, as well as the firewall, and then the IPS is included along with the antivirus and additional products.

We did evaluate several IPS products by different vendors but they all had trouble integrating with our Check Point Firewall. We made the decision that even if the other products were cheaper to buy, they would need additional integration and custom development, so ultimately it was not worth it.

My advice for anybody who is researching this type of solution is that they need to choose the product carefully. Most importantly, I would look from a performance perspective. Secondly, I would consider it from a pricing perspective because there are cheaper solutions available like Sophos and Fortinet, and they are good at what they do. If there is no firewall in place at all and this is their first project with protecting the enterprise, then it is reasonable to look at all of the vendors and look at what features are needed. The most important part is what your administrators are used to using because if you need to train them then it's additional costs.

The next thing that I would suggest is to make sure that you get a good partner because it is important to have good first-level support.  

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Check Point IPS is to be quite careful about which features you enable with it, and which protections to use. You need to balance performance with security, finding exactly the right configuration for your environment and requirements.

Overall, I would say that this is a decent product. If the pricing were cheaper then I would say that it was perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Most of our clients have the majority of their critical resources on prem to protect their DMZ, so we use IPS for that. We are resellers, implementing and providing support to our clients. I'm a system engineer IT support.

The solution helps our clients because once IPS is implemented, they don't have to worry about the security of their most critical infrastructure, and they can focus on their core business rather than the IT side of things. They know that once the solution is in place, they can have full trust in it.

The product is user-friendly and easy to implement. We receive training on how to onboard and when we are onboarding clients, we have the option of engaging Check Point to assist. It's a good provision to have. In terms of functionality, it's one of the best solutions on the market. 

Most complaints for Check Point relate to licensing fees. You need to be prepared to pay extra for implementing this product. 

I've been dealing with this solution for over a year. 

The solution is stable and robust. 

The solution is easily scalable. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward and they provide documentation that is of good quality. Deployment takes around 30 minutes and maintenance is easy.  

This is not a difficult tool to use as long as you understand the basics of networking and security. I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

Intrusion prevention and detection are the most valuable pillars in the security system, which detects and prevents exploits or weaknesses in vulnerable systems or in applications and protect against threats not only based on signatures but also based on anomalies, behavioral analysis, etc.

IPS is already integrated and comes as a security license in Check Point NG Firewalls and NGTX Firewalls.

Every defense system must have a feature set that provides complete security for Network IPS and Check Point has very powerful high throughput - almost at terabyte speed - with the help of a hyper-scale approach.

Organizations can scan for vulnerabilities know as VAPT, which many prefer as one-step closure for maximum security for the entire network. Check Point IPS plays a leading role in patching those vulnerabilities based on CVE IDS.

Based on updates received from the Check Point Threat Cloud, CVE IDs get updated or we can manually add those signatures.

It helps organizations to get a complete report for vulnerabilities in applications, the host running in the network (which helps to fixed to vulnerabilities based on CVE IDs), and gives reports for the compromised host, C&C host, DNS tunneling attempts, and protects against vulnerability in SNMTP HTTP POP, etc.

There's a good out-of-the-box configuration for recommended security based on severity levels, confidence levels, and network impact - also known as an IPS Profile.

For better security, we can edit options based on requirements and we can keep actions as detect-only which gives us alerts but allows traffic to flow without stopping anything.

There's an automatic update after every 2 hours which makes sure that the database is up to date and providing zero-day vulnerability protection.

Check Point IPS provides reports for running vulnerabilities which help enable SOC teams to respond to the highest-priority events first to patch them.

After the R80 release, there are almost all feature sets available under IPS Configuration. However, further to this, adding a direct vulnerability scan based on ports and protocol for every zone (LAN, DMZ, or Outside) will make Check Point very different compared to other vendors on the market.

Most customers take an IPS license but they don't take a SmartEvent license and when this happens, they will not be aware of the report parts such as current threats in the network open ports/protocol, vulnerabilities in a system, or detected/prevented attacks. For such cases, Check Point should provide a bundled license with IPS. 

I've been using the solution for more than four years.

The solution is highly stable for this particular blade.

Scalability can depend on throughput and if we use Maestro Hyperscale, we can distribute load across multiple Check Point Firewalls to get the maximum (in TPS) throughput.

Most of the time there is no need to take support for this,  but the CVE closure technical support team helps lot.

Customers may have had different NGFW solutions, however, after, they migrated over to Check Point NGFW.

The installation was straightforward in terms of configuration and onboarding.

We are service providers and provide services to customers.

Attacks are getting prevented and detected based on severity which helps our organization to get rid of compromising attacks.

Check Point IPS license is a must-have, and users need to make sure the database gets updated on daily basis after every 2 hours as per the defined configuration (which helps to get maximum protection).

The configuration is very simple and effective if you refer to the configuration guide properly.

We did not look at any other solution.

The solution is best in class.