Check Point

Packet filtering existed before 1993 and stateful inspection was not a Check Point invention in the academic sense. What Check Point did was turn it into something you could buy, install and administer without building it yourself, and then wrap it in a management model that treated policy as a database rather than a device configuration. That second decision is the one that aged best. Thirty years later the separation of management server from enforcement point, and the idea that you publish a policy before you install it, is still the thing that surprises people arriving from other vendors - and it is still the model those vendors are compared against.

The CCSA and CCSE study guides on this site were written from Check Point's own published exam blueprints, and they are deliberately weighted toward what catches someone arriving from FortiGate or BIG-IP. That the rule base ends in an implicit drop that logs nothing. That policy layers are an AND rather than an OR, so accepting in one layer only means the traffic proceeds to the next. That publish and install are two separate actions and stopping after the first changes nothing. None of these is difficult; all of them are the kind of thing you learn once, usually by getting them wrong. Red Education is a Check Point Authorized Training Center, named Check Point Software Technologies Platinum Elite ATC Partner of the Year 2024, which is how this chapter opened.

Studying toward CCSA and CCSE. Certifications will be recorded on the credentials page as they land; the study guides here are study material and carry no delivery claim.