It was great to experience an in-person event again! Last week, I had an excellent week with the #CheckPoint community at CPX New York. It was filled with energy, thought provoking conversations and fun! What made this year’s event memorable was being able to meet so many of you live once again. It is hard to believe that the last in-person CPX was 3 years ago in New Orleans.

There’s always a lot to discover about Check point’s security portfolio and research, so let’s dive into a few of the highlights this year.

AI plays a big role in Cybersecurity

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is what provides us with speech recognition technology (think Siri), large language model chatbots (think ChatGPT), and Facebook’s facial recognition technology. It also plays a key role in cybersecurity as it improves how security practitioners analyze and understand cybercrime. AI uses machine learning and deep learning to recognize patterns on the network. The ability to better detect and identify anomalous patterns leads to quick mitigation before any attack is launched.

At CPX last week, Check Point shared the 2023 Miercom NGFW Firewall Security Benchmark. A test was conducted among major firewalls to measure their effectiveness. The Check Point NGFW running R81.20, powered by AI, has an impressive 99.7% malware prevention efficacy. Prevention means not only did the firewall identify malware, it immediately blocked it from entering the network. The next vendor was able to achieve 72.7% prevention efficacy. If you haven’t seen the report, it’s worth a read.

Security Products Collaboration

For years, vendors have been saying that products must work together for better security outcomes. Horizon XDR was among one of the key announcements from last week where products from networks, endpoints, emails, cloud and AI from ThreatCloud all work together. Also, Check Point Infinity integrates their security products under one management console.

Check Point used a “building on fire” analogy to describe the collaboration. When a building is on fire, everyone works together to get to safety. When smoke or fire is detected, the fire alarm goes off, the elevator stops, the public-address system makes announcements to get you to safety, etc. Just like when an endpoint security product detects a malware attack, it immediately sends an alert. The firewall can block the device from entering the network and puts the device in quarantine. Security analysts launch an investigation to ensure other devices are safe.

Other Exciting NGFW Features

R81.20 Hyperflow

Hyperflow is a new feature to tackle different traffic volumes per connection. It is designed to improve the elephant flow throughput. An elephant flow is an extremely large (in total bytes) continuous flow set up by a TCP flow measured over a link. We’ll be looking to add support to detect an elephant flow and provide visibility within the Indeni product.

ElasticXL

This is an active-active orchestrator-less cluster, a new feature in a future version. The idea is to have any cluster behave like a Maestro cluster with auto-scaling capability, and with the same simplicity from a management standpoint. Although there aren’t a lot of details yet, the ability to automatically scale out with no human intervention sounds promising. We’ll certainly keep an eye on this.

Demystifying Check Point PRO Support

Talking to our partners last week, there was some confusion as to what Check Point PRO Support does compared to Indeni. Thankfully, during the “Ask the R&D Anything” session, there was a question that helped clarify it.

The question: What are the top selling points of Check Point PRO Support?

Check Point’s answer: Check Point PRO Supports opens the tickets for you automatically. Check Point Support contacts the customer about issues the customers did not know about.

Check Point PRO Support is proactive technical support. Indeni is a network automation solution. Our automation spans a wide variety of use cases, all with problem avoidance and improving mean time to resolution as primary goals.

In-depth visibility with proactive alerting
High availability readiness
Security risks identification
Organization standards or compliance enforcement
Ongoing maintenance
Best practices validation
Automated troubleshooting without human intervention

Thank you Check Point for a great event. See you next year.