Check Point Software is a finalist for two Microsoft Security 20/20 awards

By Russell Tal, Alliance Marketing Manager, published on April 30th, 2021

Last year, the first annual Microsoft Security 20/20 awards were given only three weeks before the whole world shut down for COVID-19. In many places around the world, the world changed overnight—forcing transformations throughout almost every industry.

Many of these transformations required organizations to radically alter their perspective and change their approach to information security, access, remote work, and more—but they had to build the airplane as it was taking off. This wasn’t a six-month project—it was a switch being flipped instantly.

Microsoft is one of the companies that helped these organizations keep the virtual lights on. Many companies moved their resources to the Azure cloud and took advantage of security technologies like Azure Sentinel and Azure Security Center. Microsoft’s partners, too, played a huge role in getting and keeping organizations up and running during this challenging time.

The theme of the second annual Microsoft Security 20/20 awards acknowledges this major shift: “Perspective—Through the Looking Glass.” Microsoft will give awards in 18 categories. Check Point is honored to be one of the five finalists in two of these categories:

• Most Transformative Integration Partner
• Security ISV of the Year

While we won the Microsoft 20/20 Partner Award for Most Prolific Integration Partner last year, the last 12 months have shown us that everything about the cyber security world can change dramatically. So, we haven’t rested on our laurels—we’ve launched new innovations and integrations with Microsoft, and we’ve helped our customers leverage Microsoft Azure to deal with specific business challenges arising from the “new normal.”

About the Microsoft Security 20/20 Awards

The second annual Microsoft Security 20/20 Awards will be held virtually on May 12, 2021 and will celebrate finalists in 18 categories spanning security, compliance, and identity ecosystems, with five finalists in each category. Winners will be voted on by members of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA), where each MISA member company will get one vote. All are welcome to register for the Microsoft Security 20/20 awards.

Check Point has been a Microsoft partner since we invented the stateful firewall in the mid-1990s. Since then, our partnership has grown exponentially.  Our extensive partnership encompasses sales, marketing and technical integration – enabling our joint customers to feel more confident to adopt and consume more Azure cloud services safely and securely. Check Point CloudGuard natively integrates with over 50 Microsoft services and security solutions, including Azure Sentinel, Azure Security Center, Azure vWAN, Azure Stack, Azure Kubernetes Service, Microsoft O365, Microsoft Windows, Azure LogicApps and Azure Functions.

New innovations and integrations

Two recent integrations with Microsoft, one with our Check Point CloudGuard Intelligence Platform and the other with Check Point Harmony Connect solution, have transformed the way organizations protect their most valuable resources on the Azure cloud.

Lightning-fast threat hunting: If you perform complex queries for threat hunting, you may have experienced slower performance with longer response times in the past. No more–Check Point recently migrated our big data platform to Azure to power our big data capabilities for threat hunting with our Check Point CloudGuard threat intelligence solution. Check Point CloudGuard Intelligence delivers advanced cloud intelligence and simplified visualization for faster and more efficient incident response. Other improvements include accepting more logs from different sources, including Microsoft’s KQL platform, which is Microsoft’s big data SQL language. It provides more effective incident detection and auto-remediation, augmented through AI and ML, across multi-cloud environments. Customers are able to create advanced analytics to train our ML and AI engines to analyze and enrich their cloud activities with additional context, transforming them into readable security logs which are actionable. They get faster response times when performing complex queries to perform threat hunting.

Firewall-as-a-Service Integration: If you are using more SaaS solutions in your organization, you may want to invest in a Firewall-as-a-Service solution to secure internet connectivity. We’ve found that many customers don’t want to manage a solution on their own and need a solution with low latency for better performance and scalability. Check Point Harmony Connect is Check Point’s unified security solution for users, devices, and access. It protects remote devices and internet connections from the most sophisticated attacks using Zero-Trust Access to corporate applications–in a single solution that is easy to use and manage. Check Point Harmony Connect features SaaS-based Firewall-as-a-Service, and its improvements in Azure mean that customers now have the ability to specify the deployment of their Check Point Harmony Connect gateways in an Azure region of their choice. This provides secure internet connectivity with low latency.

Check Point is a founding member of MISA (Microsoft Intelligent Security Association); in 2020, we won the Microsoft Security 20/20 Partner Award for Most Prolific Integration Partner, the Microsoft US 2020 Partner of the Year Award for Commercial Marketplace, and we were the #1 Top Global ISV Partner for the Microsoft Azure and #1 Worldwide Co-Sell Partner in Microsoft’s previous financial year. Through our extensive collaboration and technical integrations with Microsoft, Check Point secures customers’ cloud assets to drive accelerated cloud adoption for our customers, giving them more power, lower expenses, and greater flexibility. We’re proud to be a finalist for two Microsoft Security 20/20 awards this year, and look forward to continuing to add value to our Azure customers.