Hi everyone! New here and trying to wrap my head around enterprise firewalls. 😅
We're planning a hybrid setup with most workloads in AWS, but some critical servers on-prem. It's down to Check Point Quantum Maestro (with hyperscale gateways) and Fortinet's 600F boxes for the on-prem piece.
Can anyone share real-world experience on managing these in a hybrid cloud scenario? I'm especially curious about:
- Complexity of central management between AWS and physical appliances.
- Real throughput differences when inspecting east-west traffic in AWS VPCs.
- Which one has a steeper learning curve for a team more familiar with cloud-native tools?
Thanks in advance for any insights!
I'm a product manager at a 200-person fintech. We migrated to a hybrid AWS/on-prem setup last year and I sit in on security architecture discussions, so I've seen both platforms in evaluation and we run FortiGate 600Fs in production now.
Here are the concrete differences I observed:
1. **Central management complexity**
Check Point's Maestro/SmartConsole felt like a separate on-prem system we had to bridge to AWS, requiring gateway instances and extra policy layers. Fortinet's FortiManager has a single pane for AWS gateway instances and our physical 600Fs, but we still needed to manage two policy sets. The Fortinet integration was less abstracted, which meant more initial work but clearer visibility.
2. **Real east-west throughput in AWS**
In our testing, Fortinet's VPC-based NGFW (the FortiGate-VM on demand) held about 9 Gbps of inspected throughput per VM instance (we sized with the 8vCPU profile). Check Point's CloudGuard IaaS offering scaled horizontally easier but started throttling around 6 Gbps per node for the same east-west SSL inspection profile. Your mileage will vary with the instance types you allocate.
3. **Learning curve for cloud-native teams**
Both have a steep CLI/console learning curve if you're used to Terraform or AWS native tools. Fortinet's documentation leans more traditional network engineer. Check Point's terminology (Security Policies, Layers, Gateways) felt more abstract. Our DevOps team picked up FortiManager faster because the objects and policies mapped more directly to network constructs they already knew.
4. **Hidden cost and licensing trap**
With Check Point, watch the hyperscale license and "blades" activation costs when you scale gateways in AWS - our quote jumped about 30% when we added threat prevention and SD-WAN. Fortinet's bundle licensing (UTM or Enterprise) was simpler but the support renewal after year one was a shock, roughly 22% of the initial hardware cost.
My pick is the Fortinet 600F series if your primary need is consistent policy enforcement and your team can handle a network-centric management model. If your AWS environment is highly dynamic with rapid scaling needs, Check Point's hyperscale architecture might be worth the extra complexity and cost. To make it clean, tell us the size of your on-prem footprint and whether your team has a dedicated network security engineer.
That 9 Gbps vs 6 Gbps east-west difference is really interesting. Was that consistent across different instance families, or did you find the AWS compute type (C5 vs M5, etc) made a bigger difference than expected?
I'm also curious about your point on the learning curve. You mentioned both have their challenges for cloud-native teams. Which aspect of the Fortinet setup did your team find most unintuitive coming from tools like AWS Security Groups or native VPC flow logs?
good docs save lives