Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access Reviews

I'm a technical support engineer and we are a partner, buying and reselling the solution here in Israel. Our primary use case is core switches, The switches are on the customer's data. We use the product as an extension for core security reasons. Around 50% of our customers buy this product from us. It's a central product we sell for extended features of 4G switches.

The most valuable feature of this product is its simplicity. The one portal that we are using in FortiGate from Dell is the point for managing everything. The other good features are security-related, it's very easy to use those switches.

The product could be improved with additional security-related features, you can never have enough. Otherwise, I find it quite an easy product to use. Scalability could also be improved. 

For additional features, I would again mention the security and it would be nice if the 4G system was directly on the operating system.

I've been using the product for four years. 

For now, the stability is okay. 

There aren't special features that resolve any scalable requirements. There are scalable possibilities with other features of the 4G Gates unit but this is not so scalable.

I can't really answer this question because we've never had to use technical support. 

We used to use HP only and we still sell that. We now sell 50% FortiSwitch and 50% of our customers are staying with the HP switches.

The initial setup is very straightforward, it takes a few seconds. 

We do the deployment ourselves. 

I think this is a great product and everyone who chooses it will enjoy using it. 

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

We are using the product to set up a security environment for a pilot project.

The product's end-user protection feature needs improvement.

We have been using Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access for eight months.

The software is very stable.

We have 40 Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access users working on a pilot project for our organization. In comparison, Cisco is a more scalable product.

We are working with Fortinet's gold partner. We can easily communicate with them to raise tickets. The consultants and Fortinet's support team helped us during the setup process as well.

I prefer using Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access for small or medium businesses due to affordable pricing, ease of installation, and support. However, I recommend Cisco for enterprises as it is more trustworthy.

The initial setup is very simple, with an easy graphical interface. However, they could provide a more effective and secure command line interface.

The product's pricing is less compared to other enterprise solutions.

I recommend Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access to others and rate it an eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature is the security switch. The deployment is also better than competitors like Cisco and HP.

An area for improvement would be the segmentation and network in logic networks. In the next release, I would like to see a new dashboard with more information.

I've been using this solution for three months.

This is a stable solution.

This solution is easy to scale.

Fortinet's technical support is good. 

Positive

I would give this solution a rating of eight out of ten.

The management from Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access is very good.

The range of products could improve from Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access.

I have been using Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access for approximately five years.

The stability of Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access could improve.

Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access has good scalability.

We have used other solutions, such as Cisco.

The deployment of Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access is straightforward.

The price of the solution could improve, it is expensive.

I rate Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access a six out of ten.

Our general focus as a company and partner with Fortinet is to act as one of the Security Fabric solution providers. We are trying to deliver the whole solution of the Fortinet Security Fabric to our customers. The Secure Access component is a part of that solution. 

It gives us the option to offer different solutions to our clients that fit their needs and budget.

The integration between the FortiGate and FortiSwitch — the reporting and monitoring — is perfect. The reporting and monitoring of the endpoints could not be better. So, for me, this is the best feature of FortiSwitch. 

I think that Fortinet needs to focus on its pricing and improving the packages offered to users. When our company offers a client the FortiSwitches product, the customer ends up comparing FortiSwitch's pricing directly with HP and Cisco. Both of these other products cost less but they have fewer features. Fortinet needs to bring the price down to levels that are more competitive at-a-glance with these other products. If they do that, they will take more of the market because they have more features and clients will compare by features rather than by price. It is actually justified as it stands to charge more, but customers often only see the price tag.

Another thing that could be improved, although it is not actually part of the product itself, is the technical support. The technical support team is slow to respond and the responses are not always complete.

Based on my experience with the product, I think it is very stable. Up until now, I have never seen a problem with stability.

We have clients who use the same product with a different number of users — between 20 to 100 users. I do not see any problem with performance or scalability in different implementations or different network architectures.

My customers may contact technical support directly at times. Usually, we will not need to. When we do have contact with them it is not very good, and we hear the same thing from our customers. They need to improve the technical support service. Right now, they take a lot of time to reply to tickets. Then, when they respond, they are not as helpful as they could be. They need to adopt a different approach to their method of responding to customers.

Installation is very easy, especially now that Fortinet has made a lot of videos available to understand the configuration. We have done this many times as resellers, so it is easy for us. If a person has no experience at all, he or she might be able to do it themselves, or they may need someone to help them. It depends on the person's level of experience with similar products. If he has any experience with other products, he or she will probably be able to do it without any help.

We are official partners with Fortinet so we do installations for ourselves and other companies as well.

The product is one of the most expensive that customers can consider, but the pricing is justified by the functionality. It would probably be best if they reconsidered pricing so more people will use it and they will understand the value.

As a reseller, we have evaluated many options and we use whichever one seems to be the best fit for the client.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as an eight. Nothing is perfect. The technical support is a bit of an issue.

It's not fully for Secure Access, it's just for LAN Access. It's just to give access to the local LAN user. It's primarily used for this concern.

FortiSwitch is manageable. We can manage it via FortiGate. And FortiSwitch can participate in the Fortinet security fabric. We can deploy the fabric as well. It is the main feature we use for managing FortiSwitch.

It's stable.

The solution is reliable.

It is easy to set up.

The technical support is helpful.

We find the pricing to be less expensive than Cisco.

Some people know Cisco or other products when they were doing university or studies, so they feel more confident with them rather than FortiSwitch. This is a barrier. 

Most people know Fortinet as a security product bundle, and if you tell them to opt for FortiSwitch, it's a little bit complicated for them to swap their Cisco product for Fortinet. 

I'd like to see more integration with different platforms. 

We deployed the solution about five years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. We deployed it five years or so ago and still have not had a problem. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

It is pretty simple to scale. 

Fortigate can manage FortiSwitch, and there are a lot of things that you can do with your FortiGate at configuration. When you have to deploy FortiSwitch, you just need to plug it in, push the configuration from FortiGate, and go.

We are not using FortiSwitch as a company. We have a lot of clients using it. However, we only use FortiSwitch for clients that already have a Fortinet product to have the benefits of the Fortinet fabric. We have about five customers using FortiSwitch.

We don't use tech support often since we already are an integrator and we have expertise in it. For cases where we need support, like the RMA or things like that, support is pretty simple, quick, and fast.

FortiSwitch is not our primary choice in terms of a switch. We often use Cisco Switch, however, sometimes we also use FortiSwitch.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not overly complex. We have a lot of experience with Fortinet products, so with FortiSwitch, the experience is good. We know it well, which makes it easy to deploy.

It's easy to set up. It is really simple and quick. We can deploy it in maybe one or two hours if we do all the engineering stuff beforehand.

I'm an integrator. I can deploy the solution easily myself.

The solution is less expensive than, for example, Cisco.

We pay for licensing on a yearly basis. 

I'd rate the solution three or four out of five in terms of affordability.

I would recommend people to use FortiSwitch as it is less expensive than other products. They can use it with FortiGate. It will be pretty simple if they already have experience with FortiGate. FortiSwitch provides a lot of companies with big enterprise functionality, and it is less expensive than products like Cisco Switch. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We have different use cases in different sectors including in education, banking, health care.  You can say it's suitable for all types of businesses like small and medium enterprise. We use this product inside security fabric solutions. We assign switches and then integrate it with FortiGate. We implement this solution for our clients. We are a partner of Fortinet and I'm the CEO of our company.  

The security fabric is easy and the ability to manage FortiAP, FortiClient, and FortiGate all from a single console is great. Configuration and installation are quite simple. You can manage the wireless users, and the network users, the security status of all your devices including the laptops, and PC and mobile devices. I think this is one of the top features of Fortinet.

There are currently issues with some of the switches, problems with the firmware. I think they need to check the firmware, especially, with the new FortiGate firmware integration and they need to offer a strong switching feature like Cisco, especially in the VLAN management systems and integration.

I've been using this solution for almost three years. 

This is a stable solution. 

With my experience I think the scalability is pretty good for medium size businesses. 

I think the technical support is quite good although we don't have much contact with them.

Initial setup is relatively simple and quite easy for any person who has good experience with Fortinet products. Deployment takes 10 - 15 minutes max and for small or medium projects it takes one or two people. Maintenance is usually carried out by one person. 

The licensing costs are on an annual basis and cover warranty and support. There are no additional costs.

If you want to run full integration with the secure network architecture from a single point, you can use Fortinet. It's suitable for small and medium size business. You can run all your products like the wireless access points, and switches, and FortiGate and firewall from the single vendor. It will give you the security fabric features to take you to a high level of reporting and management skill.

It's important to keep up with the technical news. They have released multiple versions of the firmware with new updates and it's important to follow the new version of firmware update for Fortinet. I think there are some features where Cisco is better than Fortinet. The decision to purchase one product over another depends on your needs, your budget, and your skill.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access has essential features for managing switches.

The product's pricing needs improvement for small and medium businesses.

We have recently installed the product six months ago. We never received stability-related complaints from customers. It is a stable product.

I rate the product’s scalability a seven out of ten.

We use Sophos, Aruba, and Cisco.

The initial setup process is simple as we have experience working on various networking products.

The product is costly for SMB customers compared to other brands available in the market.

I rate Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access a six out of ten.