Fortinet FortiGate-VM Reviews

In the years that we've been using this product, we've deployed it five or six times. Most of our customers have dedicated firewalls, either physical or virtual format and a few are on a shared platform. We're authorized sellers of the product and I'm the founder and managing director of our company. 

The best feature of the solution is the EPM bundle, a lot of our clients are interested in that. Truth be told, it's quite difficult to roll that out because we have very little trust in the FortiManager and the FortiAnalyzer integration and technology.

The solution could be improved by making deployment easier and dispensing with the reliance on FortiManager, as well as FortiAnalyzer to get any meaningful reporting out of it. If they could exclude both of those from the whole equation so that it bundles direct to the firewall, that would be a big improvement. It should be decoupled from the whole ecosystem, the security fabric side of it, and that would improve things. I get the feeling we have limited functionality if we just look at the data itself, and that's not cool when you're spending thousands of dollars on a product.

The technology is just not there yet in terms of UX and true integration. We have had endless woes with our Analyzer services and the Manager seems rather rudimentary on its own. We believe that the actual Fortigate should have all this disparate functionality baked-in.

I've been using this solution for close to six years. 

The stability is absolutely awful. Every time Fortinet releases a new version, there's always some bugs that you absolutely can't avoid, so stability from our perspective, in between maintaining the service on the FortiGate, is really tricky. It's difficult to trust the quality. 

The solution is scalable if you have the budget. If you don't have the budget, it's not tied into customer budgets very nicely. There are too many moving parts and it is too expensive.

Technical support is horrific, absolutely terrible. I'd give them a negative rating. 

To install a FortiGate is a complex task. The installation engineer need to be strong technically and familiar with FortiGate. The end user also needs to be well versed in their network and have a firm technical grasp on their business requirements and how those translate to what the firewall is capable of doing/ enhancing. This can drive a prolonged pre-install and installation process.

I would recommend this solution. As a piece of tech, as a firewall, it's really good. Local channel support in South Africa is very strong. The functionality of the gate is good. I think it probably surpasses many of its competitors. So I would recommend it. I'm very familiar with the realities of looking at it so I'll be very open with my customers in recommending FortiGate and at the same time explaining the pitfalls to them. 

I would rate this product a seven out of 10. 

We are using an IPS and an IDS at the moment. 

Before using Fortinet, the company had an attack (DDoS) from the outside and had many points of failure, when they started to use Fortinet, I think the attacks stopped. The DDoS attacks were no more. This was from 2015.

It is very useful to make lists for rules and prepare firewall rules.

It is stable. We have not had a bad experience with the Fortinet firewall.

Not really, but it does have it limits.

The technical support will reply quickly and everything will be okay.

The customer care center of Fortinet is good. For all the requests that we have done, they work as fast as possible, so this is a good point for Fortinet.

I have previously used pfSense (open source) before joining this company.

However, the company has been using Fortinet for a long time.

The first setup is easy and very simple. After that, you may require assistance implementing the new rules.

The price: It is a bit higher than the other competitors. This is why I started to look at other brands. For example, I am looking at Sophos firewall and whether it can meet our requirements, since I am sure that their price would be cheaper than Fortinet.

I would recommend a company to use Fortinet, because it is an attractive solution. No bugs with a very easy installation guide, and also the support and the customer care, are very important. 

Fortinet is a nice solution with economic interfaces and a very useful installation guide. Very nice customer care, too, but the price, it is sometimes very expensive.

It has allowed us to centralize every network service into one appliance, administrating all traffic going in and out of my company. Its given us only one point of monitoring and auditing, getting us visibility of all network traffic in an easy way. 

The UTM. In particular, the IPS module is my favorite because of the security advantage reached with a few clicks and its automatic updates.

Yes, we have experience stability issues, when the product sizing is wrong or on configuration errors.

Yes, we have experience scalability issues, but only when the product sizing is wrong.

Technical support is good.

We previously used mostly Cisco products. We changed because of support and feature costs.

It is always complex when you migrate from a complex solution to another one.

It is an expensive solution if you are migrating from an open source solution. 

If you are in a licensed solution, like Cisco or Palo Alto, it is cheaper. I do recommend using it with a license, because it is a security solution and it needs updates.

Cisco, Sophos, and SonicWall.

I recommend it 100%. Go ahead and implement it.

We are implementers of Fortinet among other things (Cisco, Sophos, HPE Networking, VMware, EMC, Zimbra, etc.).

In our office, primarily everything goes through FortiGate. We expand that for all the firewall rooms that we have. We have features that link to FortiGate and from FortiGate on the shelf we ran the core cells. There is primary access to each of the devices and then we also use it between our offices. We use VPN tunnels in between offices. There are all of the typical settings within a firewall device: Protection, application control, and quality tracking.

There's routing and then there is control. For routing, there is quality. The security site has anti-virus and web filter applications. I'm used to all of them, so I wouldn't pick one or the other.

I like the traffic shaping feature. I find it helpful to be able to control the traffic.

The GUI could be improved. Furthermore, the unit we have could be modified because it's not that high of a torrent. 

It is a very stable product.

It is a scalable product. We source our current load with ease and I think it can handle a bit more. It definitely can handle a lot more capacity than what we currently use.

We do not use the tech support. We have another source for tech support.

We also considered Sophos, Checkpoint, and Palo Alto. 

We do have Palo Alto at one of our smaller offices of about 60 people. We noticed that Palo Alto is a much more costly solution.

Fortinet FortiGate-VM may be installed on Azure or AWS.

You can either install it in your data center alongside your virtual applications or put it in the public cloud to secure it.

It is very versatile.

More monitoring should be included with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, in my opinion.

It has a monitoring tool, but it could be improved.

We have been selling Fortinet FortiGate VM for at least 12 years. It could be 15 years because it has been exclusive since the beginning.

It's available both on-premises and in the cloud.

It's a stable product.

Fortinet FortiGate-VM is very scalable because you can use Fortinet FortiManager.

We have a big team of many people.

Technical support is good.

With Fortinet FortiGate-VM you can bring your own licensing, or it can be paid on a yearly basis.

Pricing is very flexible.

Definitely, I would recommend this solution to others.

FortiGate Cloud and FortiGate-VM are the same product.

FortiOS is the operating system on FortiGate.

Fortinet has a very large product portfolio. You have the VM, and you have physical appliances for Firewalls.

I would rate Fortinet FortiGate-VM a nine out of ten.

We use Fortinet FortiGate-VM as an SD-WAN solution and for security profiles.

I do not recall which version we are using. 

The most valuable feature is the WAN optimization. 

We have encountered certain issues with the bandwidth in respect of the security layer. 

I have been working with Fortinet FortiGate-VM for two years. 

The solution has good stability. 

For the moment, we don't have plans to increase the usage. 

The initial setup was simple.

The setup period can vary. I believe it did not take us more than a week. 

There are ten people in our organization who are responsible for the deployment. 

Our licensing costs are of a general nature. There are no additional costs beyond the standard fee. 

There are around 100 users making use of the solution in our organization. 

The solution is quite good. It is simple and fast. 

I rate Fortinet FortiGate-VM as a nine out of ten. 

The improvement was felt in the traffic use. Without the firewall, there is unauthorized traffic coming in from the Internet. We can’t be sure whether it is legit traffic or something malicious. With this solution, all unauthorized traffic is filtered out.

The most valuable features are the firewall and security. They filter out unwanted connections.

We are using a product from eight years ago. I am sure there have been improvements in the newer versions. Improvements on the following are needed:

1. Responsive UI
2. JIT and detailed traffic reporting.

There are no stability issues.

We did scaled up quite well. We moved our locations from 10 to 20 people accessing it to 100s of people. It could handle the traffic load well enough.

I have not requested tech support (all these years).

No.

Initial setup was quite straightforward, as we can simply head to the required sections to apply the planned network.

I have yet to research a hardware replacement. If anything, I am the one that needs some advice!

I can't remember.

This product surely will fit your basic needs at the very least. However, always match up the specifications of the products you will buy to your current and future needs.

The product is quite flexible.

There seems to be a lot of very useful feature sets.

Technical support is very helpful.

We found the initial setup to be pretty straightforward for the most part.

We've had issues with integration. It hasn't gone well.

We have had some stability issues.

There are some instances where configurations can get complex.

I've only really been dealing with the solution for the last six months. It hasn't been too long.

We've had some stability issues. The product could be more stable.

We are not in production just yet, and therefore it would be hard to comment on scalability.

Technical support has two tiers. Typically, if we need help, we have to reach out to Fortigate, who will direct us to help in Bangladesh. If we still need assistance, then it goes directly to Fortigate and they have engineers who can assist us.

We're largely pleased with the amount of assistance we receive. 

I've only really used Cisco solutions in the past. I've only recently been introduced to Fortinet.

The installation process is very easy with FortiGate VM. We can easily deploy it. That said, we did run into issues with some customer requirements and our engineers were forced to get involved. Occasionally, it takes too much time to configure certain aspects. However, a basic configuration is pretty easy.

I didn't require any outside help in order to deploy and configure the solution. I didn't need the help of outside consultants, integrators, or Fortinet techs.

Our clients tend to deal with the licensing aspects of the solution.

We're partners of Fortinet.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

We have been using the solution while we have been waiting for the hard drive version of the solution, which has been delayed.

I would recommend the solution to other organizations. I'd rate the product eight out of ten.