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FortiGate: one of the best FW products for Enterprise Org
July 15, 2016

FortiGate: one of the best FW products for Enterprise Org

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Overall Satisfaction with Fortinet FortiGate

We deploy multiple clusters of FortiGate 1500Ds nation-wide for our customers' centralized firewall as well as VPN concentrators. We also installed remote office class Fortigate to customer's locations to set up a VPN from the locations into the VPN concentrators.
  • FortiGuard (cloud-base AV/IPS/Webfiltering database) services regarless of the type of FortiGate on site are their main sell.
  • They cover most aspects of network needs with Forti-xxxx products integrated with FortiGate, such as FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, FortiAP, FortiSwitch, and so on.
  • They have top class support services like Cisco and Juniper [do].
  • Their business model relies on recurring revenue sources; service/support contract for bigger/more expensive hardware. It's not cheap to keep them for years unless yours are small enough to feel ease of annual cost.
  • Although they add some key routing/switching features from time to time, FortiGate has never been a "router" or "switch", or "L2/L3 router/switch". It's a "firewall". You can't expect the same level of routing/switching feature sets like Cisco or Juniper L2/L3 router/switch provide.
  • The level of support you can get may vary depending on how busy the support teams are. You might need to escalate if you don't think you're getting proper support.
  • They're very successful with enterprise customers/users. Mean Network Provider customers, like us, often take a back seat especially for new feature development.
  • Since they have many Forti-xxxx products in addition to FortiGate, we have some options to offer to our network customers not only FW services. That's why our top management have chosen their products for our lineup.
  • The annual recurring cost always have negative impact to our business financially.
We considered/evaluated Juniper SRX and Palo Alto Networks products to replace FortiGates. But they either had much fewer features or were far more expensive than FortiGate.
Smaller organizations who need cloud-based firewall services would get the most benefit out of FortiGate products. Provider class users need a full evaluation on exactly how they need/want to deploy. They should also see if FortiGate fits in the bigger picture (including the total cost analysis).