Check Point turns the firewall refresh into a three-year subscription

Check Point Software announced on 26 October that its Force firewalls will be available on a monthly or annual subscription from 1 November, sold through its partners. The Firewall-as-a-Subscription program puts the appliance, AI-powered threat prevention, cloud-based Smart-1 management, round-the-clock premium support and professional services credits into one payment over a three-year term. Customers can raise throughput at any point in the term and move to new hardware after 36 months.

The pitch is aimed at buyers whose capital budgets have stalled. Check Point’s release cites the IANS Research and Artico Search 2026 Security Budget Benchmark, which found that the median security budget did not grow this year and that 55% of chief information security officers saw their budgets stay flat or fall. Pete Finalle, research manager for security and trust at IDC, said in the release that consumption models which turn on-premises security hardware into “a predictable operating expense” can help close the gap. On its product page, Check Point puts the commercial change in four words: “We carry the CapEx”.

Under the purchase model, a customer refreshing a Check Point firewall buys the appliance upfront, and the vendor’s own product page describes the result: “Large hardware costs delay firewall refreshes.” The subscription replaces that purchase with a recurring contract, sold by the partner, under which Check Point keeps ownership of the appliance and much of the work around a refresh sits inside the bundle.

Check Point is moving the appliance business that shrank in its second quarter onto a recurring footing and taking on the hardware cost itself. Resellers gain a three-year billing line in place of a one-off sale, but the share of the services they keep now depends on which support option the customer signs.

A difficult quarter for appliances

The launch follows a soft patch for Check Point’s hardware. In its second-quarter results on 30 July, the company reported total revenue of $674m (£506m), up 1%, and security subscription revenue of $333m (£250m), up 12%. SiliconANGLE reported that product revenue fell 14% and that the company said several customers had moved large firewall appliance purchases into the fourth quarter. Chief executive Nadav Zafrir said in the results release: “Our go-to-market execution is improving, and we are significantly expanding sales capacity to capture a growing market opportunity.”

A customer that would have waited for the next capital budget can now start paying monthly, and Check Point secures a three-year term in place of a purchase that might slip another quarter. Its product page says customers otherwise “overpay for capacity they won’t use for years”. The program covers four Force models with threat prevention throughput from 2 to 63 Gbps, from the branch-office Force 3980 at 2–7 Gbps and the small-enterprise Force 9700 at 5–16 Gbps up to data center hardware.

“Every organization is adopting AI, and every organization deserves the same level of protection, whatever its size or budget,” said Avi Rembaum, president of global technical sales at Check Point, in the launch release.

Where the services go

Policy migration from a rival vendor’s firewall is covered by 150 Check Point Global Services Flex Credits, so the switch-over work is paid for through the vendor’s own services arm. Support comes in two forms: Premium Direct, which Check Point leads, and Collaborative Premium, which the partner delivers with Check Point behind it. Neither the release nor the product page sets out partner margins on the subscription.

A reseller that sells the program therefore swaps a hardware invoice for a recurring line, with migration sitting inside a Check Point contract. Where the customer takes Collaborative Premium, the partner keeps the support relationship for the three years. Where it takes Premium Direct, day-to-day support runs through Check Point.

An MSP billing model for the perimeter

Dave Meister, Check Point’s global head of MSP, told IT Europa in an interview published on 26 October that Check Point has about 7,000 monthly transacting MSP partners, up from about 1,000 when he took over the program in early 2023, and that more than 2,000 net new partners were added in 2026. He expects recruitment to “probably plateau out a bit”, with growth coming from partners selling more products.

According to the IT Europa report, Check Point has built consumption-based billing and flexible licensing into its multi-tenant MSP platform, with Pax8 among its leading MSP partners and Arrow, Westcon and Infinigate among its distributors. Firewall-as-a-Subscription applies a monthly or annual payment to the on-premises appliance, the part of the portfolio the product page describes as a large upfront hardware purchase.

Check Point reports its third-quarter results on 2 November, the day after the subscription goes on sale. The appliance orders it said had slipped into the fourth quarter can now arrive as three-year contracts on hardware Check Point owns, and Check Point’s launch material does not say what the reseller earns on any of them.