Azure Application Gateway vs. FortiWeb

For building scalable and highly available applications, Azure Application Gateway does most of the job on behalf of you; automatically load-balancing traffic from a number of users to a number of back-end servers. This ensure scalability and availability. The in-built security is great as can be expected from Microsoft, and user has a variety of tools for monitoring the health of the load-balancing function as well as the health of back end servers behind it.

Incentivized

Regarding my experience, I prefer to deploy FortiWeb in a reverse proxy to have the full features and protection. The other mode will be useful for special cases as will it will not have the full range of features and protection. Like offline Sniffing, it will be used in special cases.

Incentivized

• Easy integration with Load Balancer and Azure Scale Set to provide a full solution for traffic management.
• With rich routing rule, we could use one Application Gateway as the central point for all internal applications to expose to the external network.

Incentivized

• API protection
• Bot mitigation
• Web application protection
• Application delivery

Incentivized

• Live examples in the Azure documentation
• Application Gateway UI Blade in Azure Portal can be streamlined
• Have more advanced feature set as WAF (Web Application Firewall)

Incentivized

• Built-in vulnerability scanner should be better in next release
• Predefined security policies for other web application not listed

Incentivized

I don’t like that it's part of the Microsoft brand. In general, I am not a fan of Microsoft products but Azure gets it right.

Incentivized

Other load balancing tools in Azure (Azure LB and Azure Traffic Manager) are limited in their functionality in comparison with the Azure Application Gateway, and also, they don't provide security features. Azure Firewall, although it has security features, is more expensive, and most importantly, it's not a load balancer at all.

Incentivized

Most of them have the same features but not for FREE. The second point was the total cost of ownership for 3 and 5 years. Fortinet supported us with the best prices for 3 years and 5 years as well with advanced hardware replacement against the others.

Incentivized

• Positive : Improved performance and scalability
• Positive : Better and enhanced Security
• Positive : Efficiency
• Negative: Cost
• Negative: More resources to manage.

Incentivized

• ROI for last three years was 60%

Incentivized