I got back today from Check Point 2015 SKO (sales kick off) and it was great. We had a day and a half in some of the more technical areas of the product line. The R80 SmartConsole tools are going to continue to blow people’s minds. Just some of the features that will be here in end of Q1:
- Multiple RW admin support (people have asked for this for years, but now Check Point gives them a reason actually want to use it that way).
- Scripting back-end that allows for the creation of objects and rules (wow) from CLI.
- Assign groups of rules to specific admins
- Merging of the ‘firewall’ and ‘URLf and App control’ tabs (we all knew this was coming)
There is a ton more that I saw. This will be released as a pure R80 Management offering, with backwards compatibility to R77 (R75?). R80 gateway to be released in Q2. I expect R80 will be the main focus of CPX this year. It continues to boggle my mind as to why anyone is satisfied with the limitations of using a web browser to maintain a firewall security policy. If you are not using Check Point’s management tools you are really missing out.
Check Point SKO 2015