Check Point Software Technologies Firewall Appliances Reach End of Life in December 2025: An Upgrade to Give You a Smiley-face
Wednesday 15th October 2025
There’s an advertising campaign doing the rounds at the moment that pokes fun at a certain phone maker – you may have seen it, it’s the one advertising the upgrade from the “Pro” to the “all new Vanilla Pro”. I think its message is clear, and perhaps one we can sympathise with. I’m sure we’ve all looked at one upgrade or another and thought to ourselves: “Just what does this upgrade actually give me?”. Often it seems “upgrades” are little more than some new emojis.
Modern business is full of upgrades too and it’s estimated that around 30-35% of a CIO’s strategic focus is spent on business system modernisation. That’s an awful lot of time and, according to a 2024/2025 Gartner survey, CIO’s feel that only 48% of these initiatives meet or exceed expectations. CIOs in the survey cited a number of criteria that they judge the success of an initiative by, although notably Return on Investment was a central one in all cases.
That brings me to the point I’d like to address: some of Check Point Software Technologies’ firewall appliances reach end-of-life in December 2025. Specifically, if you have one of the following appliances, you will have no support available on 1 JAN 2026. Yes, it’s been five years since these appliances went end-of-sale.
- 3100 and 3200
- 5100, 5200, 5400, 5600 and 5900
- 6500 and 6800
- 15400 and 15600
- 23500, 23800 and 23900
From a CIO’s perspective, this IT initiative should be an easy – and quick – win. Many things have changed in the past five years, including hardware becoming faster and cheaper. Combine this with the fact that most organisations have seen a fundamental shift in how they consume services and here at Bytes we’re helping customers navigate this hardware refresh, through a combination of more cost-effective hardware and a proper assessment of organisation needs.
The 9000-series and new 3900-series offer an awful lot of performance for the price point and we’re finding that this fact, along with the R82 software and efficiency improvements in the underlying acceleration technologies has resulted in organisations getting significant ROI gains whilst running world-class security technologies, an important point when you consider there’s a cyber-attack occurring somewhere every 39 seconds.
In addition, our professional services consultants can help your business quickly and painlessly migrate to the new hardware, providing insight into the new features and benefits along the way. Benjamin Franklin famously said “time is money” and having one of our experts in their field managing the migration ensures that you can stick to your schedule, minimising cost and disruption and allowing you to concentrate on the next modernisation project.
To borrow from another great advertising campaign from many years ago and keeping with the mobile phone analogy: “Check Point don’t do emojis, but if they did, they’d probably be the best emojis in the world”.
Want to find out more? Reach out to us at [email protected].
Want to keep informed? Sign up to our Newsletter