Announcing the 2020 Check Point Deployment Trends Report

Indeni is pleased to announce the release of the 2020 Check Point Deployment Trends Report, analyzing the trends we observed for 2019.

Indeni observed that 63% of Check Point firewalls are running a release of R80.x, but there’s definitely a preference for older versions. For the past several years, R77.30 has been the preferred release among Check Point administrators. In 2019, it reached its End of Support milestone. In our Report, we show the gradual migration process: in terms of percent of Check Point firewalls, R77.30 fell from its high in 2018 of 65% down to a low in 2019 of 33%. The new “most popular” version of Check Point is R80.10, at 41% of firewalls, more than double its share from last year. However, taken together, these two older versions comprise about 75%.

Among hardware, Indeni observed a pattern similar to last year regarding device age: the two most common ages are appliances that are 3 years old and 8 years old. Last year, the second peak was at 7 years, implying that it’s the same hardware, just a year older. However, maintaining a peak at 3 years of age implies that a lot of hardware was cycled out and replaced, supporting the contention that some firewalls are aged out in a manner similar to servers and other general purpose computers. In fact, the median age of a hardware firewall has shifted by two full years, from ~6.5 years to ~4.5 years.

In a new feature for this year’s study, Indeni examined the concept of a “normal” network and discovered that there is indeed a bell-like distribution for “healthy” or stable networks, but as incident counts and severities rise, it creates a long tail: a significant number of organizations all experience high average Error Scores (count of events, weighted by severity, normalized per device per day), suggesting that there’s more to Operations than just a healthy/unhealthy dichotomy. It takes concerted effort to rein in issues, shifting an organization from the long tail to the bell curve, and even then it’s likely that there may be new issues every week. However, the struggle is worth it to reduce outages and, as MTTR falls, reduce the effort it takes to maintain uptime.
We hope that you enjoy this Report. Indeni prides itself on providing Operational visibility, and we see providing our annual Report as just another aspect of that. We’re providing answers to the core question, not just “how am I doing”, but “how is everyone else doing” too.

To download the full report, click here.