Fortinet FortiGate vs. RackFoundry Total Security Management (discontinued)

For FortiGate Firewall, the basic functionality and requirement is met easily as Fortigate is among market leaders in NGFW. There are some extra points that inclined us to use Fortigate as our main Firewall. [Fortinet]Fortigate has a very well refined and functional SD-WAN solution when it comes to load balancing for normal Internet Traffic. SD-WAN - Load balancing of Internet traffic is a USP of Fortigate and makes it stand tall in the competition. Be it 3 or more Internet Links, multiple Subnets/segments of users to distribute and bandwidth load balancing for links and users. SLA based monitoring of Internet Links / MPLS links, makes it even better to choose the links on the basis of performance (Latency, packet loss, Jitter etc). SSL VPN configuration - The deep CLI-level debugging is also very helpful in troubleshooting. Type of tunnel can be easily configured - Full Tunnel or Split Tunnel for SSL. Though, I think Fortigate is one of the best options for small and mid-sized organizations, there are some areas for improvement. First, the CLI interface is very hard to adapt as the commands and directory hierarchy is very different for common syntax and standards.

RackFoundry Total Security Management (TSM) is suited for most companies that have the same challenge as my team had. If you are looking to purchase one security tool and spend most of your allocated budget then I would not recommend this for you. However, if you are looking for something close to a single pane of glass, (granted there is no such thing) this solution does come close as they have the main components built in such as their FW/IPS/IDS/SIEM. Before selecting RackFoundry we had two options which were: 1) Upgrade our current solution and spend an overbearing amount 2) Search for new vendors and maybe procure 1-3 devices and then manually integrate them. Because this was a unified console and integration between devices was simple, we were able to obtain 4-6 security functions and we even had some sense of security visibility via the SIEM. It's not as powerful as Splunk or LogRhythm, but it definitely does the job

• It is the most reliable NGFW that we have ever been touch with it.
• You can easily upgrade the firewall cluster firmware without user attention!!!
• User IDentity based feature is fantastic and intrusion prevention just works with least false-positive possible.
• Very reachfull and intuitive GUI, just love it

Incentivized

• Making promises about a service and product.
• Advertising a good price and offering great services.
• Supposedly offer 24/7 365 level 1 threat triaging.

• When we switched to Fortinet Fortigate, it took some time getting used to and become familiar with the new interface. Being used to strictly command-line interfaces, a full GUI-based firewall was something brand new. Careful planning had to be done when creating rules to ensure we didn't miss anything. However, once we got used to the new GUI interface, going from one Fortinet product to another was simple, as Fortinet used the same interface for all of its devices.

Incentivized

• It has been my first year with Rack Foundry and at this point I have to say everything has been smooth, from implementation to support.

Fortinet's products have kept improving with new software releases and they continue to deliver great value. Their support is also very good. I believe that as a small enterprise, their products have given us competitive advantage delivering features and functionality that enable us to innovate and do things better. They also continue to be a leader in the markets they serve.

Incentivized

The user interface shared among many simultaneous users is very easy to get around. With shared favorites among users, most tasks are easily bookmarked and can quickly be found and edited. Their strategy for web filter integration is easy to understand and manage as well. With some general direction, setup and maintenance were easy to do and easy to teach others in the organization to do as well.

Incentivized

We had didn't any hardware failures at our two main office locations and upgraded our units last year after using them for about 5-6 years

Incentivized

Good performance and really good integration. We have integration with Microsoft AD.

Incentivized

We live in Turkey. Fortinet's Turkey office [dealt] constantly with us in our every problem or our experience. In addition, global support teams also supported every ticket we opened in every problem we encountered. They support innovative approaches and evaluate and offer solutions. In this context, they were very supportive of the problems we encountered in previous versions.

I received it a couple years afters use it and it was just to confirm my knowledge about the tool.

Incentivized

Make sure that you have the most current version of FortiOS. Make sure all Fortigates are on the same version

Incentivized

[Fortinet] FortiGate is not only cost effective but it gives the comprehensive security against the APT attacks and gives the complete traffic visibility and granular control. You can easily create the VDOMs (Virtual firewall) within a Fortigate firewall and customize the dashboard as per your requirement if you have multiple VDOMs within a single firewall.

Incentivized

Well I have experience with the big names: SecureWorks, IBM and Splunk. Individually their logging tools are much better than RackFoundry's Total Security Management. This is great for large corporations and urban cities, however not so great for municipalities, mid size businesses and companies who fluctuate between 1-7 members on their IT staff. Why? Because it takes too much of their resources and integration with other products gets a little rough as you will need to configure your preferences to theirs. When a company has stability it is great to have a name brand product, however renewals and upgrade costs can be taxing to an organization.

My environments are pretty small (less than 100 users per location) so no issues here.

Incentivized

• Fortigates have an interesting bundle model for support and subscription services that make it an attractive option to deploy Firewall, IDS, Ant-virus, anti-SPAM in a single device. The cost of the bundle is pretty much what you pay for the device, not requiring huge expenditures on it's time to renew the hardware.

Incentivized

• Overall the product has had a negative impact. Not necessarily on our environment but in the amount of time it has taken to deploy.