Likelihood to Recommend Unless you are rebuilding rules from scratch, FortiConverter is a must-have when migrating legacy rulesets from competing platforms such as
Cisco ASA , CheckPoint, Juniper, etc. to FortiGate Appliances. Without FortiConverter, guaranteed there will be some flows you missed and you will be troubleshooting them during your cutover maintenance window. Utilizing FortiConverter, you will minimize such issues as cutover time because you have the ability to stage the new ruleset in advance. Complex topologies and multi-platform migrations require highly skilled consultation from experts that [have] done this several times before.
Read full review As any other archiving solution, it is very well suited for environments with a large footprint of unstructured data (CIFS / NFS shares for user data) with a large amount of unused/old files and a need to keep those unused files for long term. In our scenario, due to some legal and contractual constraints we need to keep these files for 15 years. Archiving is a good choice to move the unused files to a cheaper storage tier, both on-prem or cloud.
Read full review Pros Audit existing rulesets from CheckPoint, Cisco, Juniper and other platforms Build migration rulesets to FortiGate Stages migration before actual cutover Reduces or eliminates obsolete and shadow rules Simple logic Read full review It gives you a good overview on user data: files age, sizes, file types, owners, etc. It is very flexible on the archiving policies. The data scans are really fast without affecting storage's performance. It has a great alternative to STUB files, which they call 'bread crumbs' (symlinks to files). Read full review Cons Programming or scripting skills are not needed but highly recommended Requires excellent command of REGEX Interface Mapping from complex topologies requires a deep understanding of FortiGate interface capabilities and scripting Read full review Its licensing plan, which takes into account the amount of data analyzed instead of data transferred. Read full review Likelihood to Renew FortiConverter is currently the best option to assist in migrating legacy firewalls to FortiGate firewalls. FortiConverter is flexible enough to be the single tool to use when migrating Check Point,
Cisco ASA , Juniper and other platforms to FortiGate Firewalls. FortiConverter is not a multi-user software however it is easy for multiple engineers to work on a single or multiple migration projects.
Read full review Alternatives Considered FortiConverter is the easiest of the firewall migration tools to use compared to Checkpoint SmartMove, Cisco Firewall Migration Tool, FWMIG, etc. It has a more robust user interface and allows you to customize the rule imports as needed. Rulebase analysis, hit count, NAT, and dynamic routing are presented in an easy to understand format with FortiConverter.
Read full review We have used
Veritas Enterprise Vault in the past, and besides its being a well-known player on the data archiving market, their tool is far more complex to implement, to manage and to keep working. Komprise is very robust and also very easy to implement, as most part of the job is done on Komprise side. The management console is delivered through a public URL as a SaaS platform. You only need to deploy a few VMs for scan/archiving/user access, which they call "Observer VMs." Komprise also doesn't uses Stub files, which is a poor implementation adopted by the competitor for file access. We had a lot of issues in the past with stub files. Komprise has implemented 'bread crumbs', which are CIFS symlinks to the files on the Observer. It is a very good implementation and it works really well.
Read full review Return on Investment Streamlined migrations successful on the first try Simple and fast cutover maintenance window Audit and tune existing rule base Quickly identify shadow rules Quickly identify rules with elevated access Read full review It allowed us to free up some space on our main storage during a time where we didn't have the budget to expand it. It allows us to move unused data to a cheaper storage tier (Azure Blobs). Read full review ScreenShots