Safe At Office 500 Internet Security Appliance 5U

Other products by Check Point

Product Details

• Item Weight: 5 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000HZES4W
• Item model number: CPSB-500G-5-US
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #36,735 in Electronics (See Bestsellers in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 21, 2006

Product Description

Product Description

Designed for the small business, Check Point Safe@Office 500 Unified Threat Management appliances deliver proven Internet security. A single Safe@Office appliance can protect a network of up to 100 users from a wide array of Internet threats, providing a solid line of defense against threats ranging from hacking attempts and bot-net attacks to phishing and ActiveX-based script viruses. In addition, by using Safe@Office VPN to access your network remotely and securely, you can increase productivity and ensure business continuity without compromising network security. The Safe@Office appliance incorporates the same patented Check Point security technology that is deployed by 97% of the Fortune 500. Simply take the Safe@Office appliance out of the box, plug it in, and secure your network in minutes.By integrating proven Check Point Stateful Inspection firewall technology with a powerful and customizable gateway antivirus, as well as a full-fledged, flexible network router, Safe@Office Unified Threat Management solutions provide complete enterprise-level protection to your network, eliminating the need for multiple security solutions for various threats. Check Point Application Intelligence technology allows the Safe@Office appliance to block denial of service (Dos) attacks, detect protocol anomalies, limit application ability to carry malicious data and control application-layer operations. These mechanisms aid proper usage of Internet resources, such as instant messaging, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing and File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and allow you to block questionable traffic and ensure that your bandwidth is used in the most efficient and secure way possible.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Nice appliance - support is horrendous, November 6, 2006

By	Robert Deutsch "Blackberry fan" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I recently bought a Safe@Office 500 for our small office. The appliance itself is very nice, throughput is decent. The issue pops up when you subscribe to antivirus and support. The division of checkpoint that handles this is Safaware. Their website is currently broken so you can't register (11/4/06). This of course does not stop them from getting you to buy subscriptions through the appliance... unfortunately you can't use them. There is chat help on the sofaware website but you can't use it if you are not signed in which of course you can't do. No support numbers are listed in any of the documentation. It took three calls to Checkpoint to get a number. The tech answered "hello"... no company name. I could barely hear him... he blamed it on a VOIP connection to India.

Most of what we were able to figure out we did on our own, a waste of two business days. We still cannot figure out how to subscribe to or use the antispam features. Getting the right ports open for Quickbooks was not easy. The wireless and wired are on a different range of IP addresses, so you will not see any peer to peer networking without mapping the directories.

Great little appliance, terrible support.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Amazing capability for low price, but 5 node limit is troublesome, February 25, 2009

By	stefan grunspan (paradise) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

for $250 you can't find anything that comes close to this box. It is similar to their $1000 and up firewalls but geared towards the SOHO market. It is very easy to configure through a browser, though you can access it through a terminal. I should qualify easy, as it is not easy for someone new to firewalls. It is not impossible and with some diligence you could get it working but it isn't linksys plug it in an go easy. It is very flexible. I have used two for site to site VPN which words perfectly. The onboard processor is powerful enough to encrypt a lot of traffic. the streaming antivirus and antispam are great because you don't have to run antivirus on each computer.
Now for the bad part. the antivirus, antispamn, automatic failover, and other advanced features require an expensive subscription, $249 a year, still cheaper than a cisco firewall. Now the annoying part. There's a five node limit meaning it will protect only 5 IP addresses. Here's the problem. If it is acting as your router and dchp server it counts every IP address leased against the node limit, even if the IP addresses go to things like network printers or DVRs or other things you don't need protected and will never go out to the net. After it gives 5 IP addresses the sixth IP can't get to the internet. Worse it takes 1 hour to refresh the node license so you have to reboot the device to release a node license. You can't create a pool of IPs that don't need protection. According to support the only workaround is to use a second router to create a subnet or to configure devices with static IPs and not give them a router IP. This second solution didn't work for me. Even if I didn't explicitly put a router IP in my HP network printer, it assumed from the subnet what the router was and hit it, and even though it had a static IP , counted against the node limit. You can buy more nodes, from 5-25 for $500, but between the nodes and the other license, now you are approaching a full $1000 cisco box.

5.0 out of 5 stars The Gold Standard in Firewalls - Cheap, August 29, 2007

By	W. Barnes (Anchorage, AK USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have deployed Checkpoint's regular products in the past and the only big downside was the cost. This product delivers the gold standard in firewalls for a trivial amount and Checkpoint's GUI configuration tool is one of the best.

That said, Checkpoint's support has never been anywhere near as strong as Cisco's or IBM's, but I have rarely ever had to call them with their main line products and never with the Sofaware line. Checkpoint seems to have gotten by their on-line subscription problems, and this now works well.

I have used several of these Sofaware boxes for office to office VPNs and it is dead simple to setup. The anti-virus scanning works well, although I have had to turn it off, for outgoing mail only, because of some timeout issues delivering mail to Africa. If you are going to use the spam filtering you need to know that this solution requires you to re-route your mail to Checkpoint's spam scanners, which then forward the mail along to your internal mail server; you will need to fuss with your DNS MX records.

Firmware updates of the firewall software are automatic and transparent. This is a major plus as getting updates to a Cisco PIX and many other firewalls, too, involve a manual firmware update.

I like 'em!