Fortinet FortiGate Cloud Reviews

It's user-friendly.

The robustness of the software could be improved.

I have been using this solution for three years.

Here and there, there will be a hardware failure, but any hardware can fail.

It's easy to scale.

It's very easy to maintain. You just go on the web, you click is there a newer software and they'll tell you yes. Then you're supposed to make a backup of your configuration file and then you download it.

It's relatively cheap.

I feel that Juniper is more solid than Fortinet.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.

We use this product to manage all of our Fortinet equipment from a single place.

This is a vast system that includes a lot of features.

The most valuable feature is the central management. If you have multiple sites, multiple regions, or if you have a spread of Fortinet equipment around the globe and you want to manage them all in one place, then FortiCloud is the best choice.

The licensing is a little bit confusing and needs to be improved.

The technical support should be more responsive.

I would like to see support for a cloud-based network access control (NAC) platform.

I have been working with Fortinet FortiGate Cloud for approximately five years.

I have not encountered any issues with stability or availability. It seems to always be online.

As a SaaS, you just got in. I'm not sure of how well it scales.

Sometimes, the time that technical support takes to respond is too long. Also, the support technicians are not always helpful. The support is not awful and often it is okay, but sometimes, they are missing information.

Overall, I would rate the support a seven or eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is pretty simple. You just sign up and select your licenses.

The price of FortiGate Cloud is generally cheaper than other similar products.

We evaluated Aruba Cloud but I can't really say which one is better. They have different markets.

This is a product that I usually recommend to people.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

FortiGate Cloud is used for larger organizations that have their services in the cloud.

It is necessary to have FortiGate Cloud if you want to protect Azure resources.

The most effective features for managing cyber threats are IPS and application control.

All Fortinet products have many security flaws, and new versions often have large security holes. The integration process takes a long time for failovers between firewalls since it uses the Azure API. The initial setup is also considered to be difficult.

I have worked with FortiGate products for maybe ten years and with the cloud version for one year.

The technical support is not very good. It suffers from overall competence issues and a lack of language proficiency. 

Neutral

I have tried Azure Firewall. It is extremely overpriced and does not have all the management features FortiGate has. I have dealt with other competitors in the past and am now focusing just on Fortinet Security Solutions.

In the past, I have worked with Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto and am currently focused on Fortinet.

The initial setup was difficult due to differences in handling network management between Azure and on-premises solutions.

I deployed it myself, but I had some colleagues I could ask questions.

The pricing is on par with other cloud providers. FortiGate Cloud is priced similarly to other providers, however, we still need FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer.

Fortinet products are just as good as any other competitor, with better management capabilities. It is easier to set up a Fortinet solution than Cisco, Juniper, or Palo Alto.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Fortinet FortiGate Cloud makes it easy to manage different firewalls in different branches or locations from one place. Since it's a central management system, it's easier to troubleshoot and access. We don't need on-premise access; we can just do it from the cloud, which is a good thing. The solution's SD-WAN capabilities enhance our network performance by making it easier to configure, which is also good.

The technical support team does not have enough technicians. Sometimes, the FortiAP causes a lot of problems with the Wi-Fi.

I have been using the solution for two years.

Once we configure the devices, the solution is stable.

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.

The solution provides good scalability.

I rate the solution's scalability a seven out of ten.

Contacting the support team is very time-consuming. The technical support team does not have enough technicians. I once did not get a technician even after being in queue for a couple of hours. Waiting in the queue for a technician is too time-consuming when the business is down.

Positive

I have also used Cisco. Some competitor tools are very expensive.

The solution's initial support is easy.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup a seven out of ten.

The solution's pricing is good compared to that of Cisco and Meraki devices.

I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten.

You can control the solution anywhere from the cloud. 

Fortinet FortiGate Cloud should improve its pricing. Also, its support is slow in Vietnam. 

I have been working with the product for two years. 

I rate Fortinet FortiGate Cloud's stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate the solution's scalability a ten out of ten. 

I have worked with Cisco, and it's cheaper. 

Fortinet FortiGate Cloud's installation is easy and can be completed in two hours. 

I rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten. 

I recommend the solution to others because a hacker or virus can enter the system. I rate it a ten out of ten. 

Our company has a partnership with Fortinet and we use the solution to provide dual authentication and BPM connection services for customers. We also help customers with product upgrades. 

The solution's ecosystem is very robust and includes a strong firewall. 

One firewall box can contain various top-of-the-line services that are packaged together for easy administration. 

The console or demonstration tool could be more user friendly. 

Better marketing is needed to elevate the solution. 

The solution partners with many vendors but some of them do not want to help or share information that would ensure good integrations. 

The EDR could use improvement to be more robust and in line with Darktrace. 

I have been using the solution for seven years. 

The solution is very stable. Some customers have been with the solution for four years with no issues. 

The solution is easy to scale in comparison to other products. 

In general, technical support is okay and issues are handled well 90% of the time.  Support could improve by being more aggressive with ticket follow ups. 

Technical support is good for us but that may be because we have a business relationship with the provider. Some of our customers have reported problems with ticketing. 

The initial setup is easy. Configurations take longer for large companies due to their complex infrastructures. 

We install the solution for customers. We have a highly skilled and experienced technical team so implementations are easy for us. A standard implementation can be done by one or two technicians. A large implementation for a company with at least 500 people can be completed by three technicians. 

Our process begins with an initial planning meeting. We configure the solution in our office and take it to our customers for deployment. Onsite work is easy and only requires a few connections and configurations. The customer sees an easy process because we prep by doing the complex work in our office. 

The solution is mid-priced when compared to other products. Cost is a factor for most customers in Costa Rica and the solution is a less expensive than Palo Alto.

Some customers follow the Gartner Magic Quadrant so they are looking for good products. The three main firewalls are the solution, Cisco, and Palo Alto.

In Costa Rica, the solution's main competitor is Cisco. The solution is easy to use but is constantly compared to Cisco which some customers say is more user friendly. The solution's console or demonstration tool seems to be the main issue with users. 

Palo Alto has a good reputation so some customers purchase it without comparing the price or characteristics of competitor products. The solution has better features than Palo Alto so it is important that its reputation gets elevated in the market.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Most of the use cases for the solution are as point products for remote sites coming back to a central hub where the gateways control the flow back into the outward sites, kind of a spoke and hub thing. There are multiple sites that are large enough to support small offshoots, and then it comes back. So you might think of it as four or five small data centers coming into two or three big data centers.

An example of how the solution has improved the organization for my client was when they had a mixed environment previously where they had Cisco and COBOL; it was ancient. What they were able to do is standardize for our product, which made their teams more efficient. When you're leveraging a fairly small backend support system, having the ability to have a robust, remote management capability and update capability, and the ability to spare and put another one in pretty quickly, those things are really important and to standardize on it. So that's what they've done. They use the old Meru wireless access points, which plug into Fortinet up until just recently.

It's a pretty robust product. Features we've found most valuable are that it's easy to manage with the management interface, it's really simple and quick. When you've got a lot of them deployed, it's a big deal. The user experience is pretty good. The efficiency and the workflow type of arrangements you can set up where you can monitor and manage remotely, and then push out updates and that kind of thing, is a big deal to my clients. Most of them are self-managed, meaning that we don't manage the solution for them. They've got their own reasons for liking it, but when I talk to them, those are the two big ones. They're easy to manage, they're easy to deploy, they rarely break.

The area of the solution that needs the most improvement, the biggest problem, is they're still trying to digest that Meru acquisition. They're starting to sundown products that have been, at least in my clients, have been pretty established. It's causing some disconnect between where their business is going, and how that vision is being imparted to the people. And there's really no plan for replacement other than rip and replace. They could improve by going to either the resellers or the client, and say, "Hey, these things have to go away because they're not going to be part of our future plans. This is how we're going to help you do it." Then show them how to do it.

I've been working with the solution for fifteen years.

The solution is very stable. Other than changes being driven by the acquisition, very stable.

The solution is scalable because they have models that they do to allow it to be right-sized. They've got plenty of models, and the really, really big arm has capabilities up to 400GB, I think. It certainly could handle any client that you see, from small to enterprise.

I have clients that range from 50 users up to 16,000 on this product.

The technical support has been pretty good. Considering COVID and all the dispersal of support resources; I deal with that with all of my partners. They're probably in the top 10%. They've kept it pretty consistent.

The initial setup is largely simple. The time it takes depends on the size of the site. The way we standardized the process for ordering is that we order the same things for every site. Same thing for every size site, and I think we have four that we typically use plus the big hospitals. Basically, there are five levels, and we order the level that's appropriate. We order any wireless that's appropriate, and then we have a standardized set up for that, for the three wireless types of service that serve our clients. Then, because they have one that's dedicated, one that's dedicated but not managed, and then one that's dirty and everybody can get onto it, because they're a hospital, and they need access. The management for the actual individual firewalls is set, and we basically copy that into each one, as we take it out. So it has a consistent setup at every single site.

For the deployment to our large clients, there are usually at least a half dozen people that do this. When you've got 16,000, you've got probably a hundred, I think there are 167 sites. So you've got to have a team of a half dozen and up. And then, in the smaller and medium clients, one person can manage this.

With regards to return on investment, the qualitative assessment goes back to all of them have noticed that they're more efficient, and they are able to maintain their network security posture more easily and at a lower cost. Now, internally, those are sunk costs when you've got a team of five or six people that are doing everything across a network, or a staff of a hundred, whatever it is. What it does is it frees them up to do something else. So there may not be an ROI that they specifically calculated for Fortinet, but what they do is they sit down and go, "Hey, since we've deployed these because they're so easy to manage, I have time to do something else."

When it comes to licensing, everybody's trying to drive that recurring monthly revenue number, and we're seeing it. The costs are reasonable, and that's the real thing that most customers are looking at. Am I getting value for that dollar; not what the dollar is, but am I getting good value for it?

When considering a solution, clients look at the usual suspects. Cisco is probably the number one, although WatchGuard in this space is very, very popular. And so is Sophos in the small to medium, because they also have gone to an integrated approach for endpoint and firewall management. So there are some similarities there, but clients have chosen FortiGate Fortinet for the reason that they're comfortable mainly with the interface. It's easier than the other ones.

The solution has started to move into things like security cameras, having an all-in-one point of security contact; they've got cameras and SD-WAN and next-generation firewalls. And they've got a large portfolio now, so we're seeing more people, especially in the small and medium-size move to something like this. In the bigger clients, what we see them doing is looking at mainly having the add-on of being able to manage the wireless through the same point of management.

My advice to customers considering FortiGate is to look at the breadth of the offering rather than a specific product. The breadth of the offering, meaning that you can do switching, you can do wireless, you can do the security cameras, you can do SD-WAN, you can do 5G. You can do it on-prem, you can do it in the cloud. There are lots of different options here that give you the flexibility to deliver a security posture you feel comfortable with across on-prem and cloud-based management. There's some AI in it now that's starting to give you some real meaningful data points on security, which are nice to have.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

The GUI interface is good.

The basic features are well-documented.

The installation is very simple. 

We have found the solution to be scalable. 

The stability is okay.

The support is not very good and is something they need to work on. I do not find them to be very helpful.

As with any IT vendor, there are software issues.

I've been using the solution for more than ten years. It's been over a decade at this point. I have used it for quite a while. 

The overall operation is pretty good. That said, the solution isn't completely stable. There's not a lot of bugs, and yet, there are bugs. Sometimes Fortinet says they will not fix a bug in a certain version as they considered it non-essential, however, for a user, it's a different story.

The scalability is good, and if a company needs to expand it, it can do so. It's not a problem.

Technical support is not the greatest. L1 support works exclusively by script, sometimes not even looking at the case to see that the info they subsequently request is already included in the initial info provided when the case was opened. There seems to be no effort at all to reproduce customer issues. They aren't supporting, and sometimes they won't fix certain things, like bugs, as, to them, they do not consider the fix something essential.

The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult. It's pretty straightforward and simple. 

We are just a customer and an end-user. We are not a partner and don't have a business relationship with Fortinet. 

We have quite a mix of deployments. We have some FortiGates deployed in Azure, we have some FortiGates that are hardware only, and then we have some FortiGates that are on EFX or vSphere.

I would recommend the solution to other users and companies. 

I'd rate the product at a seven out of ten. mostly due to the lackluster support on offer.