What advice do you have for others considering Fortinet Wireless?

On a scale from one to 10, where one is the worst and 10 is the best, I would rate Fortinet Wireless three out of 10. You may discuss this with any of the other clients who are using Fortinet. I think you will find out what kind of support Fortinet gives because there is no direct person involved from the Fortinet side to give client support. They depend on the mediator or integrators or suppliers. They help. They are trained but they are not from Fortinet. I would not go with Fortinet. You can think of it as a customer buying a Fortinet product from the company and the company has stopped their service. Then who will look after those clients? So I think there should be a direct person who provides service to the client. It could either be a portal or there could be another way to improve the services.

Fortinet Wireless is a very good product, in terms of reliability and in terms of configuration also. I would rate Fortinet wireless at a nine out of ten.

My advice to people is that the V2R radio solution is very good and that they should give it a try. Get a few access points — the minimum is two — to experience the V2R access concept. When I was first playing with the solution, I set up the software controller on a virtual machine in the lab. Just with two access points, one controller and the V2 concept. That was an eye-opening experience. When you see it working, you immediately become a fan. You will make a prayer for this technology. What is not so good is that Meru came out with the solution a little too late because now it will have a limited life and it will die. In five years, it will be obsolete. That is the long-term downside, but for the moment there is no alternative. On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Fortinet Wireless as a nine-out-of-ten. They could improve a few things like the fact that the access points get a little hot and use a lot of energy. It is running at 30 watts per access point. Also, you need to power the access points over the ethernet, so the ethernet power must be strong. It is not possible to power it from switches. They should do something about the power problem. But even with the drawbacks, my recommendation to others would be to give the solution a try.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We intend to implement this solution in our production area and eventually replace cable connections with wireless service.

Get a good wireless plan done, get a good survey done. Also, know what you really want. Every vendor comes with 100 different features but you may not end up using all those features yourself. I'm being vendor agnostic here. If you want to do a WiFi implementation: * Get a proper survey done. * Know exactly what you want. * Think about security as well. If those three steps help you zero-in on one product, that's the way to go. Fortinet has a very strong industrial presence because they acquired Meru Networks a couple of years ago. The industrial strength WiFi, which Fortinet is offering, is what Meru used to have. They have a couple of more technologies which the other vendors don't have. We've seen a big jump in the market for Fortinet WiFi. We can actually provide it at a much lower cost than the competition. The plus point of our WiFi is that we don't only provide the WiFi, we also provide security with it. This relates to another problem that I see in the market. Let's take a web developer for example. The web developer is a developer who does web pages but doesn't think much about security. No matter how good a webpage is, if that page can be easily breached then it is of no use to the client. If you apply that same analogy to Fortinet, Fortinet understands security as well as wireless LAN solutions. We can easily integrate the access part of wireless with the security part of wireless. That is appreciated very much by our customers. Since they understand that, they are very happy to go with Fortinet WiFi. I would rate Fortinet Wireless at nine out of ten because of the ROI and the TCO that we discussed, plus the ease of management. These guys they are really up on the deal. They are in the fastest moving technology industry. Whatever changes come, they implement it and do their testing very well. Overall, it's a very good product. The one feature that I am not happy about is the reporting. There's a bit of a way for them to go with that. Once they iron those things out I'm sure they'll get ten from me.

Make sure that you take the time to do a really good evaluation of the product. Make sure that you're happy with all the aspects of how it's going to fit into your environment. I'm always the type who wants the best solution, whether it be with a different vendor or not. That's one of the things that I was concerned about. I wanted the very best access point I could have. I was extremely surprised by the single-pane-of-glass management. I couldn't understand all the marketing, how they really push it. It's something that you don't really realize, until you're actually working with it, how powerful it is and how much time it saves you, and how much, in the long run, by going with the Security Fabric, you get increased security cost savings, and a better view of what's going on. There are two of us who use the solution. I do most of the configuration and setup and my colleague does our one-to-one security in our system networking. He deals more with the filtering, the compliance part, with the desktops. If there's a network issue, or connection issue, I deal more with that. Our relationship with Fortinet started out with the firewall. At the time we were looking for a solution, we used a product from FatPipe which did load balancing on multiple ISP lines. At the time, we had multiple lines - we had three different internet service providers because that was how we had to do it to get the bandwidth that we needed. We were using FatPipe to allow us to load balance our outgoing traffic over the multiple ISPs, and coming back in. We worked on coming up with another solution and, at the last minute, CDWG called us and asked us if we would talk to Fortinet because they thought it would be a good fit. We did talk to them and were impressed. We went ahead and got the device in and, not only did it solve the problem we were looking at for less than half the cost of the other solutions, but it also replaced three other devices at the same time. We just kept expanding, testing out its features. Eventually, we moved our web filtering to it. We installed the switches. We move to the APs and kept expanding on the Fabric. We moved our antivirus/anti-malware to FortiClient, and FortiClient also acts the single sign-on agent. It does the vulnerability assessment, scanning for programs that need patching, security patches, and then it auto-patches them. It has slowly become a more cost-effective way for us to manage our security and our entire network, at a little bit of a reduced cost, and with a much better view of what's going on. In terms of increasing the solution, we use the FortiAnalyzer but we're getting ready to switch to the FortiAnalyzer appliance, to increase our logging capabilities. We've finished evaluating the FortiClient EMS for Chromebook portion and we're getting ready to buy some licenses for those. We currently filter Windows and IOS devices using the FortiClient EMS solution, but we're adding support for Chromebooks and we're adding a few Chromebooks, so we're expanding there. For the FortiClient piece, on the Windows and IOS device side, there's a Telemetry piece. It ties the FortiClient EMS and your FortiGate together. It allows your FortiGate to actually increase compliance for the FortiClient piece, which is the security filtering and single sign-on piece that sits on the client. We are purchasing that. We're looking at adding the threat detection service, but we're probably going to wait until renewal time. With all the data that you collect, because you have the Fabric, the threat detection that takes a deeper dive. It analyzes and it looks into your systems further, all the way through to the endpoint. It can give you insight into the issues that you may or may not have known that you have. We'll probably add that piece next year. We purchased through a reseller. We have a really close partnership with CDWG and they were the ones who introduced us to Fortinet. Our experience with CDWG was a positive one because it opened the door to other opportunities within the same product. We've always had a really good relationship with them. Somehow, I've been dealing with the same salesperson at CDWG for 15 or 20 years now.

It's definitely a great solution. Negotiate with the vendor to activate the licenses at the moment that they install and configure the equipment. If you initially have a big project with a lot of equipment, and you have a six-month plan, licensing will start before you are using all the equipment, and that doesn't make sense. In terms of how extensively it's being used and whether its usage will grow, it's really organic. People are using the internet and using all kinds of applications on a daily basis. It's growing, more people are connected every day. Usage is changing dramatically, exponentially, really. As more people use the internet and applications on a daily basis, our customers are required to increase services and, obviously, in a secure way.

This is a very viable solution for all verticals. Do not discount the technology based on what was said several years ago. Just like any other wireless solution out there, a wireless network can be set up incorrectly without the proper wireless networking knowledge. Proper wireless network fundamentals are critical for all wireless network solutions. Combining a solid wireless network foundation with Fortinet will provide a very good experience for several years to come.

Overall, putting it in place was fairly straightforward. As with anything, I would plan it and test it before implementing. That's for any product, it's not specific to Fortinet. I give it a nine out of 10. The price performance is unmatched. If they came out with enterprise licensing, I would give it a 10.