SmartProvisioning vs Gateway Objects

[FXB]

Dear Checkmates,

our company is currently in the process of migrating into an SD-WAN solution and we will use CloudGuard-Edge VMs as well as 1500 SMB appliances for securing the WAN-network.

Currently we got around 150 SMB appliances active in our offices with most of them beeing 1400 appliances and 20-30 1500 already. 

Right now over 60% of the devices were deployed with various SmartProvisioning profiles.

Before we start with the big rollout of the SD-WAN we were thinking about if SmartProvisioning is really the "future" of managing SMB-GWs and/or CloudGuard Edge devices (which essential is the same code like 1500 appliances).

Since we are using a new R80 style policy, some of the downsides of SmartProvisioning like not beeing able to use Identity Sharing is really a challenge for us.

Additionally so far our experience with Checkpoint Support in terms of SmartProvisioning were rather dissapointing...it feels like SmartProvisioning is some kind of "leftover" feature that never was bothered to be 100% implemented and thus support has limited ressources to debug problems. The thing that it still requires a seperate desktop application in R81 kinda adds to this feeling. Again this is only our feeling and it is not really representative.

The reason we implemented it in the first place was that it was litteraly impossible to install the policy on more than 5 gateway objects at the same time via SmartConsole due to some timeouts that happend. The TAC-Case we opened for it around 3 years did not find a solution for this problem.

However with an R81 management and the new R80-style policy with very efficient inline-layers seems to have fixed this problem in the early tests we did so far, so we are wondering if going back to gateway objects would be the right step.

What are your feelings about this? Are you happy with SmartProvisioning? Did you try it out and went back? 
We are really curious to hear other opinions on this matter.

Regards,

FXB

[PhoneBoy]

R81.20 does have some enhancements with SmartProvisioning (namely adding some API support).
So it’s a far from deprecated feature.