Check Point Software Technologies and Alkira have announced a technology integration to offer Checkpoint Software’s CloudGuard firewalls in Alkira’s Cloud Network infrastructure-as-a-service (CNS). The decision comes as organizations deploying application workloads to the cloud would be struggling with the complexity of implementing consistent enterprise-wide security controls spanning cloud, multi-cloud and on-premises environments.
Talking about the offerings, users will get native security with advanced threat prevention for all workloads. According to Check Point, they will be able to deploy the same robust security in the cloud that they are used to with on-premises systems with Check Point Cloud Guard.
In addition to that, Alkira will provide a high-performance cloud network-as-a-service along with global virtual infrastructure, dynamic auto-scale, intelligent service insertion, simplifying set up, advanced routing, and day two operations for enterprise cloud networking and security deployments.
Alkira CTO’s Opinion
Chief Technical Offer and Founder of Alkira, Atif Khan, said that Check Point and Alkira are on the mission of simplifying security deployments and making it easy for enterprise customers to apply a single security posture over the entire enterprise network spanning multi-cloud, cloud, and existing data center or colocation facilities.
Mr. Khan further added that providing the Alkira virtual network infrastructure and Check Point security management tools as-a-service enables enterprises to cut the costs and complexity of DIY solutions while guaranteeing enhanced performance and scalability.
Check Point Official’s Take
Head of Cloud Security at Check Point Cloud Guard, TJ Gonen, mentioned that a combination of Alkira and Check Point Cloud Guard makes the process of provisioning and ongoing management in the cloud networking environment easy, which works as high priority leverage for the customers. He also said that the Check Point Cloud Guard platform offers cloud-native security with advanced threat prevention for all the assets and workloads over hybrid, multi-cloud, and public environments, allowing customers to leverage from a single unified security platform.
Alkira Cloud Services Exchange completely automates Cloud Guard network security gateways’ provisioning, licensing, scaling, service insertion, and health monitoring. Alkira would smoothly insert the Cloud Guard gateways at any point in the Alkira global cloud backbone, delivering stateful security controls for any cloud, on-premises, and Internet application traffic. Alkira also gives the liberty of decoupling CloudGuard to the customers from the specific cloud providers, thus offering a highly efficient multi-cloud security architecture.
Cloud environments provide a global presence and vast compute resources, but on the other hand, they would lack the necessary routing, policy, and operational controls enterprises require for a streamlined cloud firewall deployment. Even in the case of a single cloud environment, do-it-yourself solutions would result in a complex sprawl of virtual machine instances and traffic management conditions. All the mentioned problems can create quite a lot of chaos when it comes to multi-cloud environments.
Check Point CloudGuard can be quickly provisioned into one or multiple worldwide distributed Alkira Cloud Exchange Points (CXP) to offer security policy enforcement for application traffic between various set endpoints connected to the Alkira global cloud backbone.
Benefits Cloud Guard will provide after being provisioned within an Alkira CXP
- Shared cloud application services for partners and M&As
- Cloud-hosted, stateful firewall services for branches and data centers
- Cloud DMZ environment for internet encountering applications
- Security policy to and between public clouds
- Regionalized Internet breakouts for secure SaaS application access
