Fortinet FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall

As a customer, we work with Fortinet FortiGate. Our major use case for Fortinet FortiGate is our Internet, serving as the main device for routing, firewall features, and everything.

Fortinet FortiGate is one of the best firewalls in the market currently, with a lot of next generation firewall features embedded into it, including SD WAN, which is one of the best services for traffic steering, managing packet log jitter and latency for any applications, making it unbeatable in terms of pricing compared to other firewalls.

It has a significant impact on our network performance as we are a health care company where users access health care business website URLs, and any latency is managed by SD WAN without manual intervention, benefiting the operation as we have more than a thousand users across different locations.

Fortinet FortiGate Unified SASE is effective in providing security policies across multiple locations, incorporating zero touch provisioning that is very impactful and beneficial in managing network problems.

In terms of hardware-assisted DDoS protection with Fortinet FortiGate, it is performance-based, depending on the number of concurrent sessions, users, and the specifications of the hardware product.

The one concern I have with Fortinet FortiGate is the firmware versions, which often have many bugs when upgraded, leading us to revert back to older versions multiple times in my lifecycle.

For example, when upgrading the firmware version, we noticed that one of the services was not working, resulting in no packet flow for a VLAN until we reverted back.

The main area for improvement in Fortinet FortiGate is the firmware versions, as we face uncertainties regarding upgrades and frequent bugs that require self-fixing of problems.

We have been using Fortinet FortiGate since two thousand three.

Fortinet FortiGate is very much scalable, with all models from Fortinet being impactful.

Technical support from Fortinet is generally good, though there are times when it could be better.

We have used other firewalls, including Palo Alto, which we find to be very pricey compared to Fortinet FortiGate.

The deployment process for Fortinet FortiGate is straightforward.

We conducted the deployment ourselves without the help of an integrator or consultant.

The return on investment with Fortinet FortiGate is very good, as it is one of the best products available in the market.

In terms of price for Fortinet FortiGate, it is not considered that expensive when compared to other products; it is medium priced for SMB businesses.

Palo Alto is a premier product, but both solutions have their unique advantages, making it difficult to declare one superior to the other.

We have Fortinet FortiGate in different locations, where every location serves as a data center using hub and spoke technology, connecting all spokes to a primary hub and a secondary hub for reliability.

We use segmentation in core switches; however, the segmentation features are primarily managed by Cisco switches and not by Fortinet FortiGate firewall.

The effects of SD WAN integration on remote users and application performance are very positive, as we integrate all traffic through Fortinet FortiGate SD WAN and aim for configurations that enhance efficiency across locations.

We have been using SD WAN with Fortinet FortiGate for more than five or six years.

Fortinet FortiGate Unified SASE is effective in providing security policies across multiple locations, incorporating zero touch provisioning that is very impactful and beneficial in managing network problems.

The effects of SD WAN integration on remote users and application performance are very positive, as we integrate all traffic through Fortinet FortiGate SD WAN and aim for configurations that enhance efficiency across locations.

With Fortinet FortiGate, the SD WAN feature is included with no additional costs, which stands in contrast to other products like Cisco and Palo Alto, which charge extra for similar features.

I would rate this review an eight out of ten.

The key use case that we and our clients work with Fortinet FortiGate  is mainly the firewall part, the management part, and monitoring. These are the three aspects on which we are using Fortinet FortiGate .

We are using SD-WAN with Fortinet FortiGate, and it works pretty well. Multiple branches are connected to the head office.

We utilize Fortinet FortiGate data center solutions in most of the data center. Most of our clients are using data centers, so we use Fortinet FortiGate in the data centers.

On a regular basis, we help our clients to deploy the security fabric because compliance governance and audit come into the picture, and responsibility has to be decided.

In my opinion, the unique or most useful functions of Fortinet FortiGate are that it has a pretty simple deployment. It does not have any complex plugins or anything. It is very straightforward for configuration purposes. All of the configuration parameters are there in a single dashboard. Depending on your licenses, you can just configure them and then they are ready to go. The testing part is pretty easy. It is not more difficult than other firewalls.

My impression of the effectiveness of Fortinet Unified SASE  is that it is pretty good, and all the products of Fortinet FortiGate are available in a single dashboard. There is less complexity for that.

I have experience with the Unified Agent in Fortinet Unified SASE . Most of the time, it is used with Unified Forti. We have multiple devices which we can connect through that. Most of the time when we deploy this, we have to deploy the agent. The agent has less overhead on the systems. Performance does not degrade for the end users. That is beneficial.

In my opinion, a potential area of improvement for Fortinet FortiGate is that while it has a pretty good dashboard, which is not an issue as such, when we talk about hardware parameters, sometimes the hardware gets pretty heated up. Given the amount of traffic going through it, that is fine. However, the heat of the hardware has to be looked into. Fortinet FortiGate firewall is good, but other products like the switching part and all that fabric, in handling very audio-video traffic, sometimes it struggles on the switching part, but on the routing part, it is fine. On the firewall part, it is good; there is no issue as such up till now.

Additionally, I suggest that Fortinet can add software which is in a controlled way, particularly regarding AI and ML. It should not happen that the AI/ML takes certain decisions which are not beneficial for the organization. The control should remain with the team members who are responsible for configuring this firewall.

I have been working with Fortinet FortiGate for more than 10 years, probably around 13 years.

For Fortinet FortiGate stability, I can say nine. It is pretty stable.

Regarding scalability, the ability to expand, I also rate it as nine. It is easily scalable.

Regarding technical support from Fortinet vendor support, I would place it at nine.

I have been with Fortinet for a pretty long time and with Sophos, as I mentioned previously. If I compare Sophos and Fortinet, I would consider Fortinet FortiGate for critical segments and Sophos for small and medium segments.

The initial setup for Fortinet FortiGate is pretty simple.

We are partners with Fortinet, and I can confirm that we are not just integrators, but we are also resellers for Fortinet.

We sell the product directly for the vendor, not through some marketplaces; we sell directly to our end users.

In my opinion, the main benefits that end users receive from Fortinet FortiGate are that the return on investment is good. Whatever money we invest in Fortinet FortiGate product, we get it back in two years' time. It is pretty secure, having very robust hardware and software. Updates are pretty good, and in the event of an issue, updates are pretty quick. It is a pretty solid product, with the amount of money we are paying out there.

The dynamic segmentation feature in Fortinet FortiGate is working fine. We have used it, and it is pretty good. The configuration timelines have reduced because of this particular product.

In terms of pricing, I would say it is pretty good, so we can say ten for that.

I confirm that it is reasonable money for that solution.

Regarding the integration of SD-WAN with Fortinet SASE on application performance for remote users, right now we are not using SASE from Fortinet FortiGate.

We will recommend Fortinet FortiGate to other users. It is totally up to the client requirements. I rate this review overall as nine.

I have worked on multiple products including Fortinet FortiGate  VM, Fortinet FortiGate  firewalls of different models, FortiSwitch, FortiAP , FortiADC , FortiWeb, FortiAuthenticator , and some other products as well.

I have been working on Fortinet FortiGate and Fortinet FortiGate VM for around five or six years. I have deployed it as a perimeter firewall, as a data center firewall, and as a campus firewall in many banking sectors, commercial sectors, and oil and gas sectors. Most of my clients have deployed Fortinet FortiGate firewall on-premises to protect their services.

The ease of use and the user-friendly interface are the beauty of this firewall. The UI itself and the documentation are completely available on the internet. The UI is very easy, and you can easily understand the implementation. The product itself has very strong deep features and security features including IPS and malware protection to prevent and save against cyber attacks.

I have very good hands-on experience and very good deployment experience with Fortinet FortiGate SD-WAN. Fortinet FortiGate SD-WAN allows you to use multiple internets and multiple interfaces separately to load balance your internet and to load balance your services between multiple service providers. This is a very good feature in this firewall that you cannot get as a free default feature in other brands.

The network performance after enabling SD-WAN is very smooth and very efficient. I recently deployed this in forty commercial sector sites with stores that previously had MPLS circuits. With the MPLS circuit, they had a very high cost for private connectivity between sites and branches. After deploying SD-WAN, the operational cost was cut down around fifty to sixty percent because of this implementation. All MPLS costing was wiped out from their IT budget and is now dependent on internet circuits, which are normally standard internet connections.

SASE  is a very good feature. For example, I recently deployed this for a customer with users in remote locations. The issue was that they wanted users to remain connected and keep monitoring systems after office hours with no malware installed on the laptop while staying protected. The use case of SASE  involved implementing the POP itself on the cloud. The users, whether remotely at home or anywhere in the world, are connected to and keep connected with POP. They access the internet securely with secure company policies as defined by IT. They are not allowed to go directly to the internet without IT policies as defined on SASE POP. There is very good integration from SASE to Fortinet FortiGate firewall to access private access.

For improving sectors, they need to focus on technical support and work on the technical part. Although it is good, they need to onboard these things and improve the technical part of the support factor. Although it is good, it needs much more improvement to get more business and a bigger footprint in the market. Second, AI in the market and malware detection exist. Fortinet FortiGate already has these features in the Fortinet FortiGate sandbox features with built-in AI features. I prefer that they work on more features that they can provide in Fortinet FortiGate firewall.

I would rate this product ten out of ten. For example, when comparing it with Palo Alto and Fortinet FortiGate, I can provide a very good point. In Palo Alto, some features must be purchased separately. In Fortinet FortiGate, it comes with the Wi-Fi controller built-in. Features that you need to buy a separate license for in Palo Alto do not require additional licenses in Fortinet FortiGate as they are built as complimentary features in this firewall.

The network performance after enabling SD-WAN is very smooth and very efficient.

Scalability is the same, and I would rate it ten out of ten.

Technical support can be marked as ten out of eight. There is some lag, but you can find documentation and all things over the internet. They can provide support, and I would rate it eight point five to nine.

My technical team are all technically expert in deployment of Fortinet FortiGate firewall.

My team has around five or six people who are all technically sound in Fortinet FortiGate firewalls.

If we are talking about Check Point, Cisco, and Palo Alto, these are the top-tier firewalls and top-tier vendors for providing firewalls. Following the Gartner report, Palo Alto and Fortinet are at the top in the Gartner report. Because of that, Fortinet FortiGate firewall itself does not require management centers as required in Cisco and Check Point. Fortinet FortiGate firewall cannot be managed by a management center. In Fortinet FortiGate case, there is no requirement for these prerequisites to configure or implement Fortinet FortiGate firewall without a management center. We can deploy Fortinet FortiGate firewall without any management center. It is a very web-based firewall and you can access the firewall GUI from the website, and we can easily deploy it without any management center. In Check Point or Cisco cases, a management center is required. In Cisco case, the Firepower Management Center is required to get the advanced features. But in Fortinet case, it does not require these things. This is a very beauty of this firewall.

I suggest buying Fortinet instead of buying Palo Alto, Cisco, or Check Point. I will definitely recommend Fortinet.

Fortinet FortiGate has different models of firewalls which are high capacity and high variant firewalls that you can deploy as data center firewalls to protect your data centers, your server farms, and your services which are hosted inside a data center.

Fortinet FortiGate has embedded services, these FortiGuard services which have machine learning-based and artificial intelligence-based malware analysis. These services analyze malwares and next-generation malwares that are not easily identified by signature-based detection. They have the capability to analyze malware by AI-based methods and can identify zero-day attacks. Before they exploit as a zero-day, they prevent this signature and stop this attack to prevent that this is an attack. Those services are hosted in my data centers, web applications, storage, and SaaS. All are protected by those cyber attacks.

Regarding pricing, we cannot compare it right now because pricing matters based on business size and the business deal. We cannot say whether it is high or low. Sometimes we can easily compete with any brand, and in some cases we cannot compete. For example, if we have a big deal, we can get good discounts from Fortinet team. In some cases, the deal is not big, so we cannot get enough good discount. Deployment from FortiSASE  to your Fortinet FortiGate firewall over SD-WAN is very easy. Fortinet gives you multiple connections from SASE POP to your Fortinet FortiGate firewall. They have fully redundant connections on SASE POP if you have the same redundant connections with ISP connection on your Fortinet FortiGate firewalls. They have the secure SPX tunnel from FortiSASE  to Fortinet FortiGate firewall. You can easily access from Fortinet FortiGate firewall to SASE applications and SASE users who are connected on SASE POP can access local services from SASE POP to Fortinet FortiGate and access the local services.

My overall rating for this product is nine out of ten.

I mainly use Fortinet FortiGate  to implement it as a perimetral firewall solution because Fortinet FortiGate  are next-generation firewalls. I use it to protect internal network customers and configure remote access, firewall policies, internal access websites, web filtering solutions, IPS, and IDS configurations.

I implemented it approximately one year ago in an Italian manufacturer producer. My perspective on the effectiveness of the unified SASE  in providing consistent security policies across multiple locations is that it is very similar to Fortinet FortiGate, so if you know how to manage Fortinet FortiGate firewalls, it is easier and very easy to implement and configure FortiSASE .

For Fortinet FortiGate, it is very easy because it is very near to zero-touch provisioning. You need to install the box and if we speak about hardware appliances, you just need to install the boxes on the infrastructure and connect the cables to connect Fortinet FortiGate firewalls to the internet routers or MPLS routers, and configure basically the main IP address to have the connectivity. Next, you configure policy firewalls and it is very easy and very fast.

You can implement Fortinet FortiGate for small, medium, and large enterprise because it is very suitable for small and medium enterprise. For one to five or six firewalls on different branches or different sites, you can manage it manually and independently. But if you need to scale or have a large enterprise deployment, you can manage all Fortinet FortiGates directly in one panel with the FortiManager solution. There is a dedicated orchestrator delivered by Fortinet in hardware or VM solution, and with FortiManager you can manage all Fortinet FortiGates in one platform. For example, two years ago, I used to manage around 500 Fortinet FortiGates with FortiManager. It is very scalable with the correct solution and the other things you need to manage large deployments.

What I appreciate the most about Fortinet FortiGate is that it has a very large integration using Fabric , which they call Fabric  Connectors. With Fortinet FortiGate firewalls, you can manage not only the perimetral firewalls but also all the internal infrastructure. For example, you can connect access points of Fortinet for wireless and Wi-Fi and manage them directly on Fortinet FortiGate. The same applies for switches and other Fortinet appliances that can be managed directly from one single dashboard.

Fortinet has developed the firmware for Fortinet FortiGate extensively. They change the operating system continuously and very often. Sometimes they introduce many features or new features or change the commands or the method you need to use to implement something or some configuration. The fact is if you develop always or very often the firmware, you need to study every release to see if there is a new feature or something changed. Sometimes it is difficult to remain aligned with the new firmware and the features.

You need to maintain alignment with Fortinet FortiGate. For example, in Europe, we have many policies and regulations, so you need to check, tune, and configure your firewall in the correct manner and maintain alignment with the policy of the European Union. You need to always check, improve, and maintain the firmware of Fortinet FortiGate up to date.

I have been using Fortinet FortiGate for seven to eight years.

Sometimes I experience stability issues, but sometimes they are related to hardware not functioning properly or related to a software bug. Sometimes I have encountered this type of situation using Fortinet FortiGate. But in those specific cases, I opened a ticket and worked directly with Fortinet to resolve the issue for the customer.

I have worked with the technical assistance of Fortinet for my seven to eight years of career with Fortinet, and I have opened tickets with different departments of the TAC. For example, the FortiSASE  team is very effective. If you open a ticket, you have very good engineers to interact with, and they help in a correct manner. The flow is very clear to understand and resolve the issue. The only problem I have encountered in the last years with Fortinet is that if you open a support ticket for the main solution of Fortinet, for example, Fortinet FortiGate, FortiManager, or FortiAnalyzer, the support is not delivered directly from Fortinet but from partners of Fortinet. If you need to speak directly with the main core solution of Fortinet and you open a ticket, initially you are followed by a partner of Fortinet. But if you escalate to a more specific support, next you can go through a real Fortinet engineer. But sometimes this step extends the duration of the ticket and the analysis. I would give a score of 7.5 to 8 for the support of Fortinet FortiGate.

The first time that I deployed Fortinet FortiGate depends on the size of the customer. For a small to medium customer, I think three days for the initial setup and to configure some firewall rules is appropriate.

If you are a junior network engineer, you need to be followed by a middle or senior engineer in the backend that helps the junior to implement and test the solution. But for a middle or senior engineer, one person is adequate for deploying Fortinet FortiGate.

I do not follow the finance perspective directly, but what I know about Fortinet FortiGate pricing is that it is very affordable compared to, for example, Palo Alto Networks. I have observed that some people see and speak about the price of the Fortinet solution as very convenient.

I am a system integrator in Italy. Previously, until three months ago, I worked for one of the main partners in Italy called Maticmind SPA. Now I work for another system integrator, and we are a lower partnership, but we manage and install Fortinet FortiGate appliances for our customers. My overall review rating for this product is 8 out of 10.