Fortinet FortiGate Reviews

There are various use cases for Fortinet FortiGate, including firewall protection for internet access, data centers, branches, and SD-WAN. We use the firewall in multiple locations throughout our network, taking advantage of its many features, such as the promising CDR feature and security profiles like the WAF filter and application DNS security. We deploy these features in different parts of the network. Additionally, some customers use Fortinet FortiGate in the cloud to safeguard their cloud servers within platforms like Microsoft tenants.

Our customers are using Secure SD-WAN for connecting different branches. For example, oil and gas companies have different branches all over Egypt, which are not in the main city, so they need a secure connection and stability for certain protocols, such as voice and things like that. They also need visibility. They need to understand which applications are consuming SD-WAN. 

Some of the customers are also using SD-WAN for load balancing. For SD-WAN, you need at least two internet connections, so some of the customers are using it as a load-balancing technique. Overall, there are a lot of features for which customers are using SD-WAN.

For our customers, Secure SD-WAN is very useful for giving the right priority to the applications and controlling the proper use of the application.

Secure SD-WAN's interoperability with other systems and applications in the environment is very good. The integrated application protection provided by Secure SD-WAN is also good. There is a very good integration with all the applications and portfolios. We don't integrate the firewall with the application itself, but it does what is needed to control and reroute the traffic.

Secure SD-WAN has a lot of benefits. There is a calculator on Fortinet's website. When you feed the right information to that calculator, it tells you how much money you will save by acquiring SD-WAN. The first benefit is that you're going to save money. Instead of buying multiple ISP connections, MPLS, and other such things, you can use the normal internet and apply SD-WAN on it, so you can save a lot of money. You also don't need to increase the bandwidth. SD-WAN helps with the routing of your traffic and the optimum use of your links. It's efficient and secure, and it saves you a lot of money, and of course, there is the security of the firewall that's applied on SD-WAN. If we're comparing it with other vendors like Cisco, you are not getting the firewall features.

It's very efficient. There is a lot of visibility. It reduces the number of incidents. If there is any problem, you can immediately log in to the firewall, and you will know if there is a notification about bandwidth consumption or any other issue, or if there is any drop in connectivity. It makes the operation very easy. It makes it easy for the teams to respond to incidents and manage issues. SD-WAN helps to remediate threats more quickly and efficiently because, with SD-WAN, there are a lot of applications going through different links, so if you can know which link an application is using and what's on the link, you can make the right decision in a very fast way to fix it. It provides both visibility and efficiency.

It reduces your mean time to detect (MTTD). In the new version, which is version 7.x, of the FortiGate firewall, through the main dashboard, you can know what is going on. If you've done the dashboard and you're putting these statistics in front of you on a screen, once you look at it, you'll know what's going on and what's the problem. It, of course, will give you the tools and the right information to reduce the time to solve.

It's hard to say whether it has reduced help desk tickets because it's more on the operational side, but it helps them a lot. The operations team is not handling the firewall. It's either the network team or the network security team. Generally, once it's up and running, it just works. It's different from having an antivirus or something else that can be changed from day-to-day activities. With this one, once you turn it on, the service will be stable unless you have a problem with your internet. It doesn't cause a lot of problems.

In terms of helping to future-proof business, from a partner perspective, it gives you a lot of flexibility to enhance the customer network. It opens a lot of doors for sales, for a new business, and for new potential. That's from the partner side. From the customer side, you can save money and solve a lot of problems. If you need to connect with a few branches all over the country, it's efficient. You don't need to travel for five to ten hours to reach the second branch. If you have proper SD-WAN technology and it's connected in a good way with good vendors, you can save a lot of time, effort, and money. You can have proper connectivity between branches as if the guy you are talking to is next door. So, SD-WAN gives a lot of benefits at the vendor level, partner level, and customer level.

I'm primarily using the solution for security purposes, and also for managing the network for various companies. I am deploying it for uniting management statuses, in order to be able to manage everything inside and to control security policies. It can fight against attacks to the system or for email searches. It is basically a central management security appliance.

We find it's good for managing the network and offers good defense against attacks.

Technical support is great. It's really fast.

Overall the solution is pretty user-friendly. It has a good dashboard and is pretty easy to navigate.

The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco.

FortiGate is a hardware firewall that we deploy for our customers. I work on the system integration team and install whichever solution the clients choose. We also provide support, including maintenance and service. The customers contact us if they have any problems. 

The firewalls are deployed on-premise, but you can also implement FortiCloud, which can integrate with public or private cloud platforms. If you have five or six locations in various countries, FortiCloud can provide centralized security support for those offices.

FortiGate is on the cheaper end, and it offers good value. 

I have deployed several of the following models for customers: 200D, 60E, 60D. This review focuses on the FortiGate 200D.

The first implementation I performed of a FortiGate 200D was to replace a Juniper SSG-140 in a main corporate office.  This implementation provided improved network administration and network performance.

We also received more timely security updates, and it became easier to connect all of the other offices together (via an IPsec VPN mesh).

As additional FortiOS releases have come out, we have obtained more flexibility in device identification and WAN load-balancing, among other things.

We use FortiGate for security. Some clients use the whole Fortinet solution, including FortiSwitch, FortiAP, and FortiExtender, but FortiGate is my bread and butter.

We have a hybrid deployment. A lot of it is onsite, and we have data center collocations. Some customers do collocations with us, but others request connectivity to Azure or another cloud services provider. Fortinet has plugins for Azure, AWS, or Google that make it easy to configure VPNs out of the data center or off-site. 

Typically, we stick with Azure because their support is better, but we do have a handful of customers that choose AWS. We have the solution deployed across Canada. One of our biggest customers is a retail company with many little stores under their umbrella. We cover everything from British Columbia to a couple of sites in Newfoundland. I estimate that we have around 1,200 users.

We need to allow a set of websites or block another set. FortiGate gives us the ability to do it based on URL domain. It's so much easier because you input the domain microsoft.com instead of adding the specific URL. Other firewalls can't do that the way FortiGate does. It helps us with compliance and security.

We primarily use the solution as a firewall.

We use the firewall to enforce our company ideologies and principles and policies. The solution has built-in features for web filtering that are great. It categorizes it nicely for you. 

The interface itself is nice to work with. It's a lot better than the initial interface that they used to have around version four. I used to work for FortiGate some time back, and the earlier interfaces were not as good as these latest ones. 

I like that once you open it up, you have a dashboard that can give you a holistic overview of what is happening. You can see, for example, how your resources are doing on your firewall or if you still have disc space for logs and so forth.

The solution gives you an immediate view of what's happening on the hardware itself. What we have done with FortiGate is we have put up a FortiAnalyzer, a FortiGate reporting hardware. We are using it in conjunction with FortiGate. 

The solution offers good reporting. We get our reports from there. We have the opportunity to get real-time reports. 

There are great templates, so you don't have to customize them if you don't want to. You do have the option to custom create some folders and some reports, however, with what is there, you don't really need to go through extra effort, as they already give you a lot of predefined views of reports and so forth.

We have access to quite a few features. The web filter and application control are primarily what we are using. Then we also have a VPN feature, which allows for our remote users to connect and get through the firewall. 

Our organization utilizes Fortinet FortiGate for SD-WAN. All business units within our organization connect to the SD-WAN, which is constructed using Fortinet devices.

The primary reason we implemented Fortinet FortiGate was to enhance connectivity. Our previous reliance on MPLS resulted in low bandwidth and high costs. By transitioning to SD-WAN devices and leveraging common ISP connections, we have achieved two significant goals: substantial cost savings and increased flexibility in configuring device communications across our various plants.

FortiGate offers us the capability to provide visibility into and segmentation of our industrial devices. We are currently implementing this for the LAN, and we are migrating firewalls to Fortinet FortiGate devices. In this process, we are separating the operational network from the IT network.

Knowing that some of Fortinet's devices can be used in harsh environments that's nice to have. But that's something that is not needed right now just because we are only using them in very few places. These devices are specifically used to prevent intrusions in harsh environments. 

These devices help to control network traffic with OT-specific protocols. The LAN firewalls we have implemented are purchased with the functionality of network-specific modules to enable the management of network traffic with OT-specific protocols.

The approved offerings help us achieve our budgetary goals. We are adapting the budget to align with the devices provided by Fortinet. We are doing this because we can utilize Fortinet. Therefore, all of our budgets should take this into account as well.

The decision to utilize Fortinet stems from its ability to integrate with our preferred vendors. We have plans to implement both ClearPass and Nozomi as part of our OT cybersecurity strategy, both of which offer API-based interfaces for connecting to FortiGate devices. This interoperability is crucial for our organization.

The combination of FortiGate and FortiManager provides a comprehensive overview of all the firewalls we manage. It is very convenient to have everything centralized in one place.

FortiGate has helped reduce the risk of cyberattacks that could disrupt our production, which is one of our primary goals.

We were not affected by any cybersecurity attacks that would have impacted our production operations. However, we have a comprehensive plan in place to address such incidents. FortiManager enables us to block essential protocols and implement security measures across all business units if we detect a security breach in one area. This centralized approach ensures that the security measures we implement are consistently applied throughout the organization.

FortiGate has aided in centralizing the management of our network and security operations. The impact of this on the operational efficiency of our industrial network depends on how we organize it. Centralized management has significantly simplified management tasks. However, we require a dedicated team capable of addressing the diverse needs of different plants and business units, implementing necessary changes, and resolving any issues that arise. A single point of contact facilitates this process. In this regard, we have not only improved operational efficiency but also consolidated our management structure, reducing the need for multiple teams scattered across different countries.

FortiGate provides us with actionable data that helps us make informed decisions about the appropriate actions to take. Additionally, we utilize FortiAnalyzer to analyze the type of traffic we are experiencing, potential issues, and other relevant information. Furthermore, we monitor CPU memory, bandwidth, and other metrics associated with various IP connections using Fortinet devices. This monitoring is conducted across multiple firewalls. By employing these tools, we can ensure that any changes we make are the correct ones and are made for the right reasons.

The implementation of Fortinet's Security Fabric has significantly enhanced the security of our industrial control system. Previous solutions were unable to effectively manage the diverse protocols employed in this environment, resulting in operational and technological limitations. However, with the introduction of the new security fabric, we are now able to address these challenges and achieve a more robust security posture.

The Fortinet Security Fabric helps us reduce our mean time to remediation. With all its tools and centralized management, it's much easier to identify and resolve issues, leading to improved overall security posture.

Fortinet helped mature our approach to cybersecurity for protecting our industrial equipment.

I used this solution while working with my last organization. I handled plain firewall deployment as well as SD-WAN deployment. 

I was providing consulting services to various Telco customers. It helped customers save on the cost of highly expensive MPLS links. With the help of Secure SD-WAN, they were able to utilize broadband or even LTE connectivity, which saves costs. That's the flexibility that Secure SD-WAN gives to various customers. In addition to saving costs, they are also able to utilize active-active load balancing, where you can have two parallel links: primary and secondary. The secondary one used to sit idle in traditional scenarios, whereas now, the solution gives you the flexibility to configure both links as active-active, so you can prioritize critical traffic from link one and other traffic from link two. At the same time, you also have the option to maintain redundancy.

Secure SD-WAN is a great way to manage your entire organization network, especially the WAN network. Customers don't have to hop to multiple places. Fortinet has a solution called FortiManager. With the help of that, you can monitor, configure, and maintain your entire organization's network. It's a very convenient option. It's a single pane of glass from a customer's point of view. They don't have to log in to individual devices, and they can see the real traffic. They can see what's coming into the network, what sort of alerts or logs are there, and what sort of applications are being consumed.

Secure SD-WAN doesn't help with tool consolidation, but it's a secure way or mechanism they provide so that if branch users are accessing the internet, they can directly break out from the branch location rather than coming back to the data center. In that way, it improves the user experience while also giving security at the highest level.

I have not interacted much with Secure SD-WAN in terms of API integration or third-party integrations. However, they have pretty good integration with the RADIUS, LDAP, and AD servers. In that way, they have everything in-built. You can make the firewall a DNS server or some sort of DHCP server. Such features are included there. From a security standpoint, they have open API integration with their own SIEM or SOAR solutions. Third-party API integration is also possible, but the API details that are exposed are very limited.

The integrated application protection provided by Secure SD-WAN is a cool feature. They have real-time scanning of the application with the help of SSL inspection. You get to see the real-time traffic of applications, and you can protect your network from harmful websites. They have a signature database for that. This data also gets refreshed. It's a direct feed that the device takes from the central intelligence.

When you have Secure SD-WAN in place, you are more secure from the outside internet. They have a flavor of SASE, but I have not worked on it.

When you have a granular view of your entire network including users and security features being enabled, you get more visibility into your network. You get to know what's coming in and going out. If an administrator sees that some traffic is being hit repetitively from a particular location, functionality is available to block a region, country, or even an IP or domain.

In terms of Secure SD-WAN reducing our mean time to resolve, in the case of issues specific to SD-WAN, I've seen instances where customers can look into the dashboard and inform the support team that this is the issue they are facing. This helps them to have some visibility into these firewalls and isolate the entire issue from the technology perspective; for example, when a wireless client is facing some sort of challenge accessing the internet, whereas some of the wired users are able to access the internet. The testing tools given in the FortiGate GUI dashboard come in handy during troubleshooting. With the very user-friendly interface, it becomes very obvious and easy for any IT guy to simply follow the workflow to resolve any day-to-day operational issues.