As a general rule of thumb, it has been a long accepted strategy in IT to avoid vendor lock in, or trusting too much in a single equipment provider that you get stuck because changing to another vendor would be too costly or inconvenient. This is especially true with public cloud providers, and fear of vendor lock in is often cited as a major road block to further cloud adoption.

So how do you eliminate the risks of putting all your IT eggs in a single virtual network basket? One approach to solving this dilemma is a multi-cloud strategy. A multi-cloud approach provides benefits beyond simply eliminating financial risk; it can also help businesses redefine their software strategy.

Different cloud platforms are often better suited for specific systems. Generally Microsoft Azure is preferred for running Microsoft-centric applications and workloads while AWS or Google Cloud Platform is preferred for Hadoop-based application workloads. A multi-cloud strategy gives businesses the option of running applications in optimized environments based on their specific development needs. In addition, costly downtime periods can be dramatically reduced as organizations can now build back-up and redundancy across multiple cloud platforms.

However, this approach presents some significant security challenges. Since each public cloud provider utilizes different security and management tools, getting a clear picture of what’s really going on across multiple cloud platforms becomes problematic. What’s more, all public cloud providers tackle security through a shared responsibility model – where both cloud providers and customers are accountable for different aspects of security – often leaving customers with inconsistent controls, limited threat visibility and poor reporting.

Lacking a consistent security footprint means more manual intervention across disparate tools and management interfaces, increasing the likelihood of policy and configuration errors that places cloud data and applications at risk. It’s time for a new security model that gives businesses the greatest choice and flexibility of cloud platforms without sacrificing security protections, visibility or management.

Today we are pleased to announce the expansion of our vSEC cloud security portfolio to support Google Cloud Platform. With this announcement, Check Point now brings consistent security protections, visibility, management and reporting to the broadest range of cloud platforms, including Google’s highly scalable and reliable platform.

Check Point vSEC for Google Cloud Platform seamlessly extends advanced, multi-layered security to protect workloads in the cloud from external attacks while enabling secured connectivity from on-premise enterprise networks to the Google cloud. Fully integrated security features include: Firewall, IPS, Application Control, IPsec VPN, Antivirus, Anti-Bot, and our award-winning sandboxing technology SandBlast.

Security protections on Google Cloud Platform can be tailored based on your specific requirements, while consolidated logging and reporting across all cloud environments makes compliance with regulatory mandates a snap. Designed for the dynamic security requirements of cloud deployments, vSEC automatically scales as needed and enhances visibility by integrating Google cloud objects into security policy and logs.

Single click template-based automatic deployment of vSEC on Google Cloud Platform ensures security is easily and rapidly deployed to keep your cloud assets instantly protected from even the most sophisticated threats. What’s more, only Check Point provides centralized, unified management of all security gateways – from physical to virtual on premise and in the cloud.

vSEC gives you the confidence to securely extend your data center resources and workloads to virtually any public cloud environment, without sacrificing any of the benefits public cloud infrastructure provides. Any cloud, any service – always secure with Check Point vSEC cloud security.

vSEC for Google Cloud Platform is available immediately in PAYG (Pay-as-you-Grow) or BYOL (Bring-your-own-License) options through the Google marketplace.

To learn more about vSEC for Google Cloud Platform, visit: https://www.checkpoint.com/products/vsec-google-cloud-platform/#overview

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