I'm Rajiv Thomas, and I work for Gas South.
We are one of the fastest growing companies in the South
for natural gas marketing.
Security is paramount for us because our customers trust us
with a lot of information.
When we were looking at taking our data center
and hosting it in-house, the biggest challenges was space
and stability of power in our building,
and that sealed the idea that this is not a viable option,
and we had to go to the cloud.
When Check Point announced CloudGuard,
it was completely a seamless transition
from an on-prem to a cloud-based solution.
It filled in our biggest gap of having a DR solution.
Our users could just login into Azure,
and everything worked,
and they didn't have to change anything.
We were confident that even if we lost the entire power
in our on-prem devices, our call center,
which is our bread and butter, could go home,
log into CloudGuard in Azure
and be online and continue to service our customers,
which is our most important thing.
And secondly, they are secure
because it's coming through a Check Point firewall.
About four months ago, we had a complete power outage
in our data center.
The on-prem devices were completely offline.
Luckily, we had CloudGuard up and running.
We just sent out a very simple one page instruction to them,
and we haven't heard back since.
Everybody's still logging into CloudGuard,
and it worked seamlessly.
That saved us a lot of heartache from the business
and from the management with the solution
in CloudGuard and Azure.
Once we moved to the Azure platform
and we decided to deploy CloudGuard,
we found that the seamlessness
with which CloudGuard plugged
into the Microsoft Azure fabric
and just seamlessly tied into all the other infrastructure
that we had, either IaaS or PaaS,
it was day and night different
from all the other technologies
that we did a proof of concept on.
With the partnership between Check Point and Microsoft,
it made total sense to just go to the Microsoft Azure cloud.
Any other customer that's thinking of following the path
that we took of going from an on-prem
to the cloud environment, as we call it,
the digital transformation, it is not a hard road.
If you are a Check Point customer on top of that,
the support that you will get from both Microsoft
and Check Point makes it a seamless transfer,
and it just works exactly the same way,
and it administered exactly the same way.
It integrates into the same client.
The users use the same credentials.
It is straightforward.
There is no learning curve at all.
It's a point and click and go,
and that was a big selling point for us.
For your security people,
you will not see any learning curve at all.
We, in fact, migrated 14 servers over a weekend
from on-prem, physical boxes to the Azure cloud,
set up our own domain during that weekend
and had our users logging in on Monday morning.
They didn't even know they had changed anything.
It was seamless and straightforward.
Azure basically is a phenomenal platform.
Now when you bring in world class winners like Check Point,
it is a perfect match.
It works out the box, and it has all the functions
that a physical device has.
If you're considering the Microsoft Check Point CloudGuard
integration and solution,
I would definitely recommend you do a POC on it.
With Check Point, you have the exact same functionality
that you have with a physical device available
on the Azure platform with CloudGuard,
and we just converted that POC straight out
into a production in less than a week
because we knew exactly what we needed to do,
and that was the difference Azure and Check Point together
in the partnership made to us.
And you will find the value that is there
in that solution way outweighs anything else
that I have seen currently available in the Azure platform.
We have benefited greatly from this partnership
between the two of them
not only from a product perspective
but also from a support perspective,
and that's support that came
from both the teams together as one,
treating us as a customer is what makes a difference for us.
It's a win-win solution for everybody.