Buyer’s Guide to Cloud Network Security

Introduction

As organizations accelerate adoption of public cloud platforms, attackers are increasingly targeting cloud-hosted applications and infrastructure. Web applications and cloud workloads are particularly attractive attack surfaces because they are internet-facing and frequently store sensitive business and customer data. Research from Check Point Software Technologies highlights the scale of the security challenge. According to the 2025 Cloud Security Report, 65% of organizations experienced a cloud-related security incident in the past year, yet only 9% detected the incident within the first hour, allowing attackers significant time to move laterally and access sensitive resources. For organizations evaluating cloud network security solutions and cloud firewalls, this Buyer’s Guide explains the top ten considerations with explanations of why each consideration is important. The document introduces Check Point’s Cloud Firewall as a Service and describes how it answers the top ten considerations and provides examples from customer stories and testimonials relevant to each consideration.

A Diverse Cloud Vendor Ecosystem to Secure

Figure 1: Tens of Cloud Vendors Require Integrated Threat Prevention and Access Control

This diversity of network technologies makes it challenging for any organization to ensure a robust cloud security posture for their precious revenue-generating applications and data. As more clouds are added, the challenge to secure increases exponentially. When purchasing cloud firewalls, it’s important to remember that cloud security takes place in the context of a shared responsibility model. At the infrastructure level (IaaS), cloud providers are responsible for securing their compute-network-storage infrastructure resources while users are responsible for protecting the data deployed on the infrastructure as well as access control to it. The tools and services offered by cloud providers to help users uphold their end of the shared responsibility model are important elements of any cloud network security solution. However, cloud providers are not specialists in security; these cloud provider tools and services must be complemented by partner solutions to achieve enterprise-grade network security.

Shared Responsibility Model

Why is this important?

Detecting a threat after it has breached the corporate network exposes the organization’s assets to unacceptable levels of cybersecurity risk. In order to stay a step ahead of malicious actors—including zero-day and other agile exploits—threats must be captured and neutralized before they penetrate the network. This advanced prevention is possible only by deploying a deep security solution that applies advanced methodologies across multiple layers. Most importantly, a deeper and more comprehensive cloud network security solution will reduce the probability of a cloud breach and minimize the impact and damage if and when it occurs.

The Top 10 Considerations for Evaluating a Cloud Network Security Solution

Here are the top ten criteria you should use to choose your company’s optimal cloud network security solution:

1. Advanced Threat Prevention and Deep Security: Threat detection is not enough to effectively protect cloud assets in today’s complex cybersecurity landscape. You need multilayered, real-time threat prevention for both known and unknown (zero-day) vulnerabilities. The solution must deliver deep security through features such as granular and deep traffic inspection, enhanced threat intelligence, and sandboxing that isolates suspicious traffic until it is either validated or blocked.

2. Borderless: The solution must run transparently and consistently across even the most complex multi-cloud and hybrid (public/private/on-prem) environments. A unified hybrid mesh management interface should provide a single source of ALL network security truth as well as a centralized command and control console.

3. Granular Traffic Inspection and Control: Look for next-generation firewall (NGFW) capabilities, such as fine matching granularity that goes beyond basic whitelisting, deep inspection to ensure that traffic matches the purposes of the allowed ports, and controls at not just the port level but the application level as well.

4. Automation: In order to match the speed and scalability of DevOps, the solution must support high levels of automation, including programmatic command and control of security gateways and automated threat response workflows.

5. Integration and Ease of Use: The solution must work well with your company’s configuration management stack and be deeply integrated with the cloud providers’ offerings. Your goal should be to streamline operations and promote ease of use by minimizing the number of point security solutions you have to deploy and manage separately.

6. Visibility: The solution’s dashboards, logs, and reports should provide end-to-end and actionable visibility into events as they are happening. This visibility is also important for enhanced forensic analytics should a breach take place.

7. Scalable, Secure Remote Access: The solution must secure remote access to the company’s cloud environment with features such as multi-factor authentication, endpoint compliance scanning, and encryption of data-in-transit.

8. Dynamic Policies / Context-aware Security Management: The cloud network security solution must be able to aggregate and correlate information across the entire environment so that security policies can be both context-aware and consistent.

9. Vendor Support and Industry Recognition: Use impartial recommendations to seek out a vendor that can drive your cloud security strategy forward. Look for a vendor who meets your security needs and can be a trusted cloud security advisor for many years.

10. Total Cost of Ownership: This is determined by a number of factors, including the flexibility of the licensing model and the level and scope of personnel required to administer the system.

Check Point: Advanced Cloud Network Security

Check Point Cloud Firewall as a Service provides unified cloud-native security for all your assets and workloads and across your multi-cloud environments, giving you the confidence to automate security, prevent threats, and manage posture. One of its fundamental capabilities is delivered as a service that extends Check Point’s advanced threat prevention to dynamic cloud environments.

Cloud Firewall as a Service

The Key Cloud Firewall as a Service Features and Benefits

• Enterprise-grade, advanced, multilayered threat prevention: Check Point preemptively protects cloud assets against known and unknown vulnerabilities.
• Granular traffic inspection and control: Implement deep SSL/TLS inspection for incoming and outgoing traffic.
• Borderless: Quickly deployed and works seamlessly with multiple cloud service providers.
• Automated, agile network security at scale: Cloud-defined elements are updated in real time and security policies adjusted automatically.

How Check Point Compares with the Competition

This table compares Check Point Cloud Firewall as a Service and the cloud network security solutions of leading cloud security vendors:

Five Questions You Must Ask Cloud Security Vendors

1. How do you preempt cybersecurity attacks before they can harm our cloud assets?
2. How do you support our security posture requirements?
3. Can you give us a single source of cloud security truth and a single point of cloud security control?
4. Are we going to have to disrupt our current compliance and security practices?
5. How can we be sure that you can continue to meet our cloud security requirements as they evolve over the long term?

Summary and Calls to Action

Generative AI and multi-cloud networks are revolutionizing the way we build and deploy applications. Cloud migration continues to be a major task with inherent risk for IT teams. Organizations currently burdened with the expensive maintenance of cloud firewalls or business risk should consider implementing Check Point Cloud Firewall as a Service for security over their cloud assets.