Most of my work with the Check Point Next Generation Firewalls involved analyzing firewall logs, verifying security policies following infrastructure changes, and examining traffic within, outside, and across the network.

One feature that came in particularly handy was having detailed information for any connection that was blocked. Rather than just getting information about the source and destination, I was able to examine the traffic at the application level to see which services and protocols were causing the traffic. In the context of policy changes or adding new apps, this allowed me to make sure that there wasn't any unnecessary exposure while retaining necessary business traffic.

Checking hit counts and ensuring that traffic was behaving as expected after making policy changes was also an important task. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The more that firewall policies increase in number, the more difficult their management will become. It is necessary to perform careful validations when making changes to such rules since their order and inspection modes will determine whether or not traffic will be treated correctly by firewalls.

Finally, I recall dealing with issues involving legitimate traffic whose treatment changed upon modifications made to the policies. It is hard to predict how such policies will interact if they are managed by several people from various departments.

Additionally, it can be problematic to maintain clean policies in the long run if their regular checks are neglected. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.