Is EMS License required?

[Roy_Smith]

Hi

We are looking to start making the move to Office365 but need to make sure we don't compromise security.

We currently have a mix of MS E3 and F1 Office365 licenses. For additional security, we would need to purchase EMS licenses as well. However, if we went down the Cloudguard SAAS route, would we still require the MS EMS licenses?

If not, what features would we lose? And if we do need EMS as well, what does EMS provide that SAAS does not?

Thanks in advance
Roy

[Abigael_Levy]

Hi @Roy_Smith,

I am Abigael, the RnD Product Manager for CloudGuard SaaS. You are definitely right in your approach to consider security solutions in parallel to your move to Office 365. CloudGuard SaaS is the Check Point offering that will guarantee you get comprehensive security for Office 365 but also other SaaS applications you may decide to use in the future (or are already using).

I am not familiar enough with Microsoft's offering to give you a detailed comparison between CloudGuard SaaS and EMS.

I suggest you check our Datasheet here and our Product Feature Set as a starting point.

You can also reach out to your local Check Point representative to get a demo of CloudGuard SaaS or even quickly start a free trial here if you already have an Office 365 account (even if its a testing account). You will get access to all the product features for 30 days.

You're welcome to reach out directly to me with any questions.

Best regards,

Abigael

[Roy_Smith]

Hi Abigael

Thanks for the info. I am looking through the various feature sets trying to untangle what they the CP and MS products all do and which are relevant to us. 

I suspect the only way we will figure it out is to do some trials and POC, which we have discussed with our support partner and will be looking at in the next few months. I was just hoping others had looked at this and provide any pointers.

Thanks
Roy

[Ryan_St__Germai]

We are currently in the process of moving to O365 as well. However, we are not leveraging the Checkpoint SaaS offering. To answer your question, it sort of depends on what you want to protect because you do get some additional protections from MS that you dont get from Checkpoint. Also, If you have MS 365 E3 (NOT O365 E3) then you can go with the MS 365 E5 Security License for $12/month which is essentially EMS-5 minus the azure information protection P2. This was introduced earlier this year. For the F1 licenses you would need to do EMS if you wanted the same protections.

The biggest addition would be the Azure ATP, which you can integrate with your on-prem environment and detect malicious user behavior. Its essentially Microsoft ATA but hosted in the cloud. You would also get Microsoft Cloud App Security which is an awesome SIEM like app that aggregates all of your O365 audit data and detects abnormalities in addition to allowing you to write rules and define actions on these rules such as block user, alert quarantine files, etc.

I suggest you look at this comparison chart below. Look and see what features you get and decide if you need/want them. The 4th Column is E3+E5 sec, which I touched on above. The CheckPoint SaaS solution is essentially O365 ATP p2 for email and sharepoint then leverages conditional access policies and audit data for the identity protection part and does DLP, which Azure information protection would end up doing. So there is some overlap with some features/addons with checkpoint. 

https://infusedinnovations.sharepoint.com/:x:/s/Public/EcWcoHQRZzVNnoo8GAYLqDwBj01kz2j3VKXaJHNOhFZQj...