By Jonathan Maresky, CloudGuard Product Manager, published February 26, 2021

“Confidence in Check Point security leads to more rapid movement to the cloud” According to the Forrester Study

Check Point recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact study on Check Point CloudGuard Network Security and found that in addition to CloudGuard securing hybrid-cloud assets, it also provided a 169% return on investment over 3 years.

Cash Flow Chart (Risk Adjusted) for the Forrester Total Economic Impact of CloudGuard Network Security

Let’s drill down into all of these components and explain them in detail, one by one.

What is CloudGuard Network Security?

Cloud network security is a key foundational layer to protect customers’ cloud migration and cloud assets.

CloudGuard provides cloud network security via a cloud-native security gateway, which enables advanced threat prevention for North-South and East-West traffic and macro-micro segmentation across all public, private and hybrid-cloud deployments. Additionally, Check Point’s Security Management console provides unified and consistent visibility, policy management, logging, reporting and control across all cloud networks as well as for on-premises deployments.

Organizations with on-premises environments and in the process of migrating to the cloud with CloudGuard receive unified and consistent security management of all their on-prem and cloud environments and experience the easiest, quickest and most secure cloud migration with lowest total cost of ownership.

When we tell the story of CloudGuard Network Security, we normally focus on the industry-leading security, the automation capabilities which are vital for everything in the cloud, and the broad and deep integrations with cloud vendors to ensure that CloudGuard customers are protected everywhere.

But this blog will explain the value from another perspective: the economic quantitative benefits of using Check Point cloud network security.

What is the Forrester TEI study?

CheckPoint commissioned Forrester to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect a customer’s decision to invest in CloudGuard. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that CloudGuard can have on an organization, including:

  • Due diligence: Forrester interviewed Check Point stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to CloudGuard.
  • Customer interview: They interviewed a decision-maker at an organization, using CloudGuard to obtain data with respect to costs, benefits, and risks.
  • Financial model framework: Forrester constructed a financial model representative of the interview using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewed organization.
  • Case study: They employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling the investment impact: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks.

Given the increasing sophistication of ROI analyses related to IT investments, Forrester states that their TEI methodology provides a “complete picture of the total economic impact of purchase decisions”.

The interviewed customer

Forrester interviewed a CloudGuard customer with over $10 billion revenue located in the United States. This large global healthcare company is part of a regulated industry with critical need for data protection and is required to adhere to privacy laws, such as HIPAA. The company has been a Check Point customer since 2011, using on-premises network, endpoint, and public/private cloud security for multiple cloud deployments.

Key findings

Forrester analyzed the quantified costs and benefits of using CloudGuard over three years and calculated the present value of all future costs and benefits:

  • The costs of using CloudGuard over three years, including license, implementation, support and training) was analyzed to be $891,000 with a total present cost of $740,207.
  • The benefit over the same period was analyzed to be $2,431,638, with a total present benefit of $1,989,117.
  • The net benefit of using CloudGuard over three years was analyzed to be $1,540,638, with a total present net benefit of $1,248,910.
  • The present value Return on Investment was calculated to be 169% with payback period of less than 3 months!

“Each cloud [service] has its own language. With CloudGuard, we use the same set of tags across multiple clouds and across different accounts and subscriptions. We would have had to manage everything separately if we had done it natively.” Cloud Architect, large US-based healthcare company

The quantified benefits

These were divided into 4 main areas:

  • Labor productivities from a single solution: Using a single solution with a single pane-of-glass console to manage public-cloud, private-cloud and on-premises security allows an easy migration to the cloud with minimal additional training of the network security team, as well as the ability to share consistent policies between all deployments.
  • Reduced breach cost: Forrester estimates that the frequency of cloud breaches and the cost of each breach are lower than with built-in native security provided by cloud services providers. Please note that the Forrester study uses their own breach cost estimates, while other studies have higher estimates of breach costs, for example IBM’s 2020 Cost of a Data Breach report.
  • Time savings for developers: The study states that CloudGuard has enabled the customer to better control the developers’ application of security rules without hindering them.
  • Avoided cost of compliance and audits: For example, for HIPAA audits, the customer said: “When the HIPAA auditors come in, we print out the HIPAA report, then hand it to them. It gives them the details on everything that they are going to ask for in an audit, and it makes their lives a whole lot easier. It is pretty awesome.”

The unquantified benefits

The customer experienced these but they could not be quantified for the purposes of the TEI study, including: continued improvement of CloudGuard over time, quality assurance, and a broad cloud security platform with multiple capabilities including Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Workload and Application Security, and Cloud Intelligence.

CloudGuard is always improving. And we like the acquisitions that they make, such as Dome9 for security posture management.” Cloud Architect, large US-based healthcare company

I strongly encourage you to download the Forrester TEI study to understand this excellent study in more detail.

In addition to the written study, we are running a series of regional webinars with Microsoft to discuss the TEI in more detail and understand the ROI of migrating workloads to Azure. Webinar participants will also participate in a “fireside chat” and Q&A with Microsoft and Check Point regional execs around Digital Transformation and how best to secure your cloud journey.

Check Point is one of Microsoft’s leading ISV partners globally.

Register for the webinars here:

What’s next?

If you’d like to learn more about CloudGuard Network Security, please speak with your Check Point channel partner, your account manager or security engineer or contact us.

If you are in the process of planning your migration to the cloud or you are already in the cloud, please contact us to schedule a demo, and a cloud security expert will help to understand your needs.

How secure are your Azure and AWS clouds?

The Check Point Cloud Security CheckMe performs a quick and easy high-level analysis of your Azure vNet and/or AWS VPC and sends you a report of your vulnerabilities against advanced threats.

Do you want to read more about cloud security?

Download the Check Point cloud security blueprint documents:

  • This document introduces the cloud security blueprint and describes key architectural principles and cloud security concepts.
  • This document explains the blueprint architecture, describes how Check Point’s cloud security solutions enable you implement the blueprint, and how these address the cloud security challenges and architectural principles that were outlined in the first document.
  • This document provides reference architectures for implementing the cloud security blueprint.

If you have any questions, please contact your local Check Point account representative or partner, or contact us here.

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