© 2025 Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved.

Why Aren’t Customers Deploying the Best Protection in the Cloud?

While the benefits of a ‘Cloud First’ strategy for organizations are widely recognized, some

cloud and network security professionals remain hesitant to deploy third-party firewalls in

their cloud landing zones. The question is why.

It’s obviously not due to a lack of desire on the part of organizations and their engineering

teams to get a secure next-gen cloud firewall; otherwise, AWS, Azure, and GCP wouldn’t be

promoting their firewalls as such. So, why is it that, despite all the tests and benchmarks

proving that built-in cloud firewalls are inadequate, companies still opt to use them?

The short answer to this reluctance is two-fold: 1) Engineers often use the first firewall they

encounter, which is typically the one provided by their preferred cloud provider; 2) The

prevailing, yet mistaken, belief that third-party firewalls are too challenging to deploy,

integrate, and manage compared to the ones provided by cloud providers.

DevOps Myth Busting: Hyperscaler Cloud Firewalls vs. Check Point Cloud Firewall

© 2025 Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved.

CLOUD MYTH BUSTING: HYPERSCALER VS. 3RD-PARTY FIREWALLS

DEBUNKING MYTHS ABOUT HYPERSCALERS’ CLOUD FIREWALLS 1

Debunking Myths About Hyperscalers’ Cloud Firewalls

Put Simply If your roadmap stops at a single cloud and a single workload, and security is not a concern, Cloud

Service Provider (CSP)- built-in firewalls are sufficient. However, if you live in the DevOps reality of

hybrid, multi‑cloud estates with constant change and management overhead that stretches your

resources thin, and if security is your objective, Check Point Cloud Firewall is the one and only

solution that will meet your needs.

“Built-in hyperscaler firewalls are easier to deploy.”

Reality: Sure, if your world consists of a single cloud in AWS or Azure with a few VPCs/VNets. Now,

picture your organization adding GCP and a self-hosted Nutanix cluster. At this point, with CSP built‑in

firewalls, you will need three separate stacks, three IaC modules, and three change windows. Now,

contrast that with Check Point Cloud Firewall, where you get one Terraform module that drops a

Gateway Load Balancer‑integrated cluster in AWS, an Azure VM Scale Set in Azure vWAN, and a

Nutanix‑AHV VM, all auto‑registered to the same Management Server integrated with autoscaling

solutions, such as Azure VMSS, AWS ASG, GCP MIG, and OCI Instance Pool.

“Built-in hyperscaler firewalls are easier to manage.”

Reality: Within their own little cloud, yes, built-ins are easier to manage, but once you step into the multi-

zoned hybrid and multi‑cloud blueprints, built-ins become a toil multiplier with duplicate rules in

duplicate consoles and audit evidence scattered across portals. Check Point Cloud Firewall, on the other

hand, is managed through a single console instance that can push a single rule base everywhere, with

tag-aware objects that auto-update when any cloud CI/CD job spins up a VM, eliminating the need to

worry about IP ranges or resolving multi-cloud address conflicts.

“Built-in hyperscaler firewalls auto-scale better.”

Reality: Built-ins auto‑scale per cloud, not per application and policy! If your microservice spans two

regions and two clouds, each with its own built‑in firewall, it scales locally, but the policies don’t follow

suit. The Check Point Cloud Firewall, on the other hand, natively integrates with AWS ASG, Azure VMSS,

GCP MIG, and OCI Instance Pool within the same flow, allowing both capacity and policy to scale together.

“Built-in hyperscaler firewalls provide better logging and visibility.”

Reality: Built-ins’ logging and visibility are adequate inside a single cloud but utterly blind across clouds.

Conversely, Check Point’s Cloud Firewall streams every gateway’s logs to Smart‑1 Cloud and, optionally,

© 2025 Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved.

CLOUD MYTH BUSTING: HYPERSCALER VS. 3RD-PARTY FIREWALLS

CONCLUSION 2

to AWS Security Hub or Azure Sentinel via Log Exporter, so SecOps can correlate a single timeline rather

than stitching together JSONs from different portals.

Conclusion Built-in firewalls are great, until you need to scale, because speed at setup doesn’t translate to speed at

scale. The moment your environment expands across clouds and into private data centers, “easy”

firewalls become scattered silos with different consoles, duplicate rules based on messy IPs, fractured

visibility, and policy drift that keeps your engineers stuck in review loops.

Check Point provides a single policy layer, unified logging stream, and a single management plane with

API, IaC, and CI/CD-driven controls. And no matter how many clouds you span, Check Point Cloud

Firewall scales with your infrastructure and pipelines, while providing 100% security effectiveness

compared to 0% effectiveness from built-in firewalls, as was shown in CyberRatings.org’s Q1 2025

comparative evaluation, and boasting a block-rate of 99.9% of zero-day and one-day malware, 99.74% of

phishing links, and 98% of exploit attempts, as published in Miercom’s Q1 2025 Enterprise & Hybrid

Mesh Firewall Security Report.

Cloud Footprint and Complexity

E ff

o rt

Almost click to deploy

P F D roup based policies

imited to cloud roles or re uires rd party tools

Domain iltering F D and H P ildcards

Speci ic to each cloud no SD A

Separate Solution

Policy management and log sprawl

Complicated rules and P overlap errors rd party

ative user group based rules AD

integration

App signatures protocols and packet headers

support or on prem apps ative Cloud irtual A SD A routing Built into the

gateway Sel ad usting

policies

F aaS or virtual appliance peering

ag ob ect based policies

Cloud agnostic policies across assets and security hubs with native multi

cloud routing

Worldwide Headquarters

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U.S. Headquarters

100 Oracle Parkway, Suite 800, Redwood City, CA 94065 | Tel: 1-800-429-4391

www.checkpoint.com

© 2025 Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved.

https://www.checkpoint.com/resources/items/report-cyberratings-cloud-firewall-test-results-q1-2025 https://www.checkpoint.com/resources/items/report-cyberratings-cloud-firewall-test-results-q1-2025 https://www.checkpoint.com/resources/items/report--miercom-enterprise--hybrid-mesh-firewall-benchmark-2025-ae1d?fw=18b74 https://www.checkpoint.com/resources/items/report--miercom-enterprise--hybrid-mesh-firewall-benchmark-2025-ae1d?fw=18b74