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Fortigates are good options for Firewalls
Updated December 19, 2017

Fortigates are good options for Firewalls

Artur Bittencourt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Fortinet FortiGate

We use Fortigate as our main firewall to protect the network and to establish VPN between 2 sites. We make use of most Fortigate modules and subscription such as anti-spam, anti-virus and Intrusion detection systems. The Fortigates protect our Internal network and the public Wifi we provide to the public. We also take advantage of the Web filtering functionality.
  • Unified Protection: Having firewall, IDS, Anti-virus and Anti-spam on the same appliance is very handy as you don't need to deploy multiple appliances/solutions
  • User Access Control: Setup Firewall rules based on Active Directory User and Groups help with the constant need for firewall changes, saving the network folks a lot of time.
  • GUI Interface: Very intuitive Management interface, makes the need for CLI changes very seldom
  • Non-disruptive upgrades on standalone boxes. Not sure if the technology would allow it but it would be great to have.
  • Subscription signatures auto-deployment could affect production traffic. In some circumstances letting Fortigate accept subscription signatures may cause the device to drop traffic
  • 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.
Fortigate is a lot easier to configure and manage than a Cisco ASA Firewall. Fortinet feels a lot more intuitive and easier to configure than Cisco. Fortinet is a lot more innovative and have easier to use products.
I've only used Fortigates in small and medium environments with multiple locations and the Fortigates work very well. They are usually very low maintenance and easy to upgrade. Creating site-to-site VPNs, as well as SSLVPNs, are very simple on Fortigates. The low-end Fortigates have pretty much the same functionality as the high end and can be managed the same way.