Check Point 2210 Appliance review

Check Point's new 2200 Appliances combined enterprise level network security with an SMB price tag. Its software blades provide a wealth of features, but do they complicate deployment? Read this exclusive review to find out.

IT Pro Verdict

Check Point’s SmartConsole management and monitoring tools are geared up towards handling multiple appliances and this makes the 2210 best suited to remote office deployment or offered as a managed security solution. SMBs will find the appliance offers a very impressive range of features that perform well for the price, but as a standalone product it’s not the easiest to deploy and manage.

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The identity awareness blade is also new and is used to link user names to systems, so security policies can be applied to user identities regardless of where they log in from. Setup is also wizard driven and you can define AD authentication and use captive portals for guest workers or visitors.

For monitoring and reporting, Check Point uses a central log server that all other appliances send their data to. For standalone deployments this means the appliance will be handling these duties as well.

SmartView Tracker and Monitor provide access to all firewall logs and real-time graphical views of appliance performance and

SmartView Tracker and Monitor provide access to all firewall logs and real-time graphical views of appliance performance and

The SmartView Monitor provides views of activities in real time with traffic graphs for areas such as the top services, destinations, sources and tunnels. Viewing the system counters allows you to keep an eye on processor and memory usage, firewall activity, packet size distributions and so on.

Policy activity for each security blade can be viewed from SmartEvent. The latest v75.20 version of SmartConsole provides a freshly designed interface which includes real time views, graphs and timelines so you can easily see threat trends and anomalies.

You can't view activity for the anti-spam blade in SmartEvent and will need to use the SmartReporter tool for this. SmartReporter provides an extensive selection of reports which can have a range of filters applied and be scheduled to run regularly and emailed to selected recipients.

We did come across some problems though, as the only available anti-spam report is hidden in the Express report section and can only look back over the previous 14 days. We also found some of the URL filtering reports wouldn't generate any data and suspect they still only work with Check Point's older legacy blade.

Check Point's new 2210 appliance has a lot of sophisticated security features for the price. They're not the easiest to deploy and manage, but Check Point's software blades are a great idea as they allow you to customise the appliance precisely to your requirements.

Verdict

Check Point’s SmartConsole management and monitoring tools are geared up towards handling multiple appliances and this makes the 2210 best suited to remote office deployment or offered as a managed security solution. SMBs will find the appliance offers a very impressive range of features that perform well for the price, but as a standalone product it’s not the easiest to deploy and manage.

Chassis: Desktop Memory: 2GB RAM Network: 6 x Gigabit Ethernet Storage: 250GB SATA hard disk Ports: 2 x USB2, RJ-45 console Management: Web browser, CLI, SmartConsole Software: SmartDashboard, SmartEvent, SmartProvisioning, SmartReporter, SmartUpdate, SmartView Monitor, SmartView Tracker

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.

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