The PhoneBoy Blog

One Icon To Rule Them All

20 Apr 2009

One of the things I will not miss about working for Nokia is all of the crap that the IT department loads on the company laptops. Aside from all the end-user apps, there were different programs for:

• Firewall (it wasn’t the Windows firewall, either)
• VPN
• Anti-virus
• Hard drive encryption

Needless to say, these programs (and many others) bogged down my laptop, making it slow.

When I got my Check Point laptop (or rather a hard drive from Check Point for my existing laptop), I was surprised to find all this functionality and a whole lot more in Check Point’s Endpoint Security client. A single icon in mytask bar shows me:

• Firewall
• VPN
• Antivirus
• Antispyware
• Program Control (ability to restrict certain apps from running)
• Full Disk and Media Encryption

The client is fairly unobtrustive and does its thing without too much hassle, aside from the occasional request for VPN authentication. My taskbar has many less icons than it did before. The machine is also significantly faster than it was with my Nokia image. All in all, I am very happy with this change!

I’m looking forward to learning more about Check Point’s Endpoint Security offerings, both on the enterprise side as well as on the consumer side (under the ZoneAlarm brand). I think there’s a compelling story there.