Advanced Network Security with Check Point CloudGuard and Nutanix Cloud Platform

As businesses continue to migrate to the cloud, delivering the highest level of network security becomes increasingly challenging due to infrastructure and workload complexity. Check Point CloudGuard Network Security offers a comprehensive solution with Nutanix Cloud Platform to support advanced networking architectures like Transit VPC and Tenant VPC in highly available configurations. By leveraging the Nutanix Service Insertion Framework and AHV hypervisor support, CloudGuard provides consistent security policy enforcement, full threat visibility across physical datacenters, hyperconverged infrastructure, and public cloud environments. CloudGuard also delivers robust SD-WAN capabilities and end-to-end protection for private, hybrid, and multicloud environments. Let’s explore how this integration simplifies cloud network security.

When it comes to securing cloud assets the focus has been on protecting the perimeter—or north-south traffic—going into and out of the cloud. There is also a severe security risk when threats can traverse unimpeded once inside the cloud or datacenter network. Traditional network security approaches to this problem are manual, operationally complex and slow, and are unable to keep pace with dynamic cloud and application environments. What is needed is a cloud-aware network security solution that can perform deep packet inspection of traffic and apply advanced security capabilities to help prevent threats from penetrating the perimeter.

CloudGuard Network Security’s Native Integration with Nutanix

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security integrates with Nutanix to seamlessly provide advanced security features that protect modern applications and software defined networks. This native integration enables:

Ease of Deployment: Check Point CloudGuard integration with the Nutanix Prism management console accelerates deployment and provides management of all network security from a single pane of glass, allowing administrators to oversee security services with minimal effort.
Automation: Dynamic policy management using native Nutanix objects adapts to workload and network configuration changes enabling consistent protection without manual intervention.
Enhanced Visibility: Log consolidation across datacenters and cloud networks offers deep visibility into network traffic, applications, and threats across Transit VPC and Tenant VPC architectures dramatically simplifying forensics and troubleshooting.

Transit VPC and Tenant VPC architectures are fundamental in modern cloud networking, providing scalability, security, and segregation of resources. Here’s how CloudGuard supports these architectures:

Transit VPC: Acting as a centralized hub for interconnecting multiple VPCs, Transit VPC simplifies routing and security management. CloudGuard integrates seamlessly to secure traffic flowing through the Transit VPC, enforcing consistent policies and delivering advanced threat detection and prevention.
Tenant VPC: Tenant VPCs allow resource isolation for specific teams or applications. CloudGuard ensures tenant isolation by deploying tailored security policies, safeguarding sensitive workloads from lateral threats and reducing blast radius.

Active/Standby HA Check Point Gateway Protecting Nutanix Tenant VPCs

Active/Standby HA Check Point Gateway Protecting Nutanix Tenant VPCs

Leveraging the Nutanix Service Insertion Framework

The Nutanix Service Insertion Framework facilitates the deployment of third-party security and networking solutions directly into the cloud environment. CloudGuard leverages this framework to provide network security in an active/standby configuration for high availability:

World-class Security: Service insertion allows CloudGuard to secure east-west and north-south traffic seamlessly without disrupting workloads.
Centralized Security Policy Management: Define and enforce security policies across on premises and cloud networks from a single interface.
Cost Efficiency: When public networks are leveraged instead of expensive MPLS circuits, businesses may see significant reduction in networking costs.

With these capabilities, organizations can deliver secure and efficient connectivity across distributed environments, whether on-premises or in the cloud.

Benefits of the CloudGuard and Nutanix Integration

The collaboration between Check Point CloudGuard and Nutanix delivers multiple benefits:

Consistent Access Control: enables organizations to create detailed security policies to control access to all network resources across datacenters and clouds. These policies can be defined based on various attributes, such as IP addresses or CIDR block ranges, user identity, geographic, virtual network boundaries, and time-based rules for restricting access during specific periods.
Advanced Threat Prevention: Check Point CloudGuard provides industry-leading threat prevention security with a 99.9% block rate to help keep datacenters protected from even the most sophisticated threats. Fully integrated multi-layered security protections include intrusion prevention systems (IPS), application control, URL filtering, anti-bot and anti-virus to protect against known and unknown threats, malware, and botnet activity.
Integration with Nutanix cloud-native security capabilities, automation and extensibility framework are leveraged by Check Point to dynamically insert, deploy and orchestrate security services inside the Nutanix HCI. From a single management console, Check Point provides customizable macro and micro segmentation to secure datacenters, private and public cloud networks help prevent unauthorized lateral movement and to limit threat blast radius.

Conclusion

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security along with Nutanix empowers organizations to achieve a secure, scalable, and efficient cloud network. By supporting advanced cloud architectures like Transit VPC and Tenant VPC, and leveraging the Nutanix Service Insertion framework, Check Point delivers AI-powered Network Security, access control, and threat prevention to Nutanix deployments. Whether you’re migrating to the cloud, modernizing your cloud infrastructure, or enhancing multicloud security, the combined strengths of CloudGuard and Nutanix provide a robust, flexible, and future-ready security solution.