What is our primary use case?
My customers use Fortinet FortiGate for their branches and campuses; we have provided it for small retail and industrial networks.
Chennai is totally based on MND and BFSI for the factories, and since Fortinet FortiGate provides OT Security, they have numerous features. In the same single firewall, they can use SD-WAN as well as OT signatures to have visibility for partners.
What is most valuable?
The best features of Fortinet FortiGate include selling a perpetual license as a primary benefit, and the license cost is not much compared to Cisco, Meraki, or HP.
Feature-wise, I can rate Meraki over Fortinet FortiGate a seven or eight since they have micro-segmentation and application routing. They can detect real-time threats with FortiGuard, which is similar to Palo Alto. Now they are implementing AI features, and I recently went through the demo, which is amazing.
The main benefits that Fortinet FortiGate brings to customers include that if you're going for a single fabric with core switches, access switches, and APs, compared to legacy Cisco or Aruba, te Fortinet FortiGate does not require a controller for the access points. Fortinet FortiGate itself acts as a controller.
Similarly, they have FortiLink, which connects all appliances in a single stack, allowing maintenance with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer. In comparison, Cisco requires a separate controller for SD-WAN and Nexus ACI controller, and other things require a Cisco DNA controller. However, with Fortinet FortiGate, it's simple to maintain using FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer, thus being very much easier and cost-efficient.
What needs improvement?
In terms of improvements for Fortinet FortiGate, they could offer evaluation licenses, as compared to Meraki, which provides a 90-day evaluation. In Fortinet FortiGate, they do not provide standard evaluation licenses; instead, we need to request them from the OEM through the account manager for POCs. If we want to conduct a demo, we need to work with real hardware.
In comparison to Cisco, we have DCloud, which helps with providing demos to customers, but in Meraki, I need to reach out to them, book a lab, and they need to provide all the hardware. I need remote access and L3 engineers to program it; only then can I offer a real-time demo to the customer.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with the Fortinet FortiGate for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
My impression of FortiGate's performance is that it performs quite well; when performance issues arise, it's not the box, it's the users, traffic, and bandwidth overloading. Apart from that, whatever the capacity of the hardware is, it is performing quite well.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Regarding the scalability of the Fortinet FortiGate, if it is a VM, it is easy. However, if we're talking about hardware, in the designing phase, we need to consider being about 30% or 20% higher to make scaling easy. Otherwise, they need to change the entire hardware. That's why we are pushing managed services, so the ISP and MSSP partner will take care of scalability. Still, in terms of scalability, it is quite difficult; if they are expanding, they need to change the hardware for the new hardware.
How are customer service and support?
I would rate the technical support of Fortinet FortiGate as a five because it is not as strong as Cisco. Additionally, the turnaround time is very high compared to Cisco.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
My impressions of the setup costs are that they are reasonable; definitely, they are reasonable.
What was our ROI?
The change in return on investment after implementing Fortinet FortiGate solutions for the SD-WAN for hybrid workforces is evident; we did it five years ago for one customer, and now the end of support and end of sale life has come. I can see a 10% to 20% infrastructure change. We received 2% to 3% higher than the original sales, and we have also done the renewals. They are also increasing branches, and overall, the RMS has increased by 50% to 60%.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My impressions of the setup costs are that they are reasonable.
What other advice do I have?
For users who would like to start working with Fortinet FortiGate, my recommendation is that it will not create a problem, but once it has been programmed correctly, and all the use cases are rightly fitted, you can forget the issues. The only thing that needs updating is the threat intelligence and network configurations. Apart from that, maintaining FortiGate is easy.
I work with the dynamic segmentation feature in the Fortinet FortiGate. The dynamic segmentation feature plays a significant role in preventing the lateral spread of different threats within the data center environments; for example, for web hosting, there are multiple OEMs who have different warehousing solutions, and they don't want to mix the data between their OEMs. In this case, dynamic segmentation comes into the picture, allowing me to create multiple VRs for the data center within a single tunnel for data segregation.
I work with some customers who are going to integrate the unified SASE capabilities in Fortinet FortiGate, and we are working actively on that, but up until now, I've not taken any deployment on the SASE part. We are working with multiple customers, but they are not suggesting it yet. As of now, I just went through the demo for the AI regarding the SD-WAN part, and I didn't go for the data center things. If you ask me about the SD-WAN front for deployment or integrating the SASE along with that, it is comparatively easy. Within minutes, I can see it in real-time; they can deploy five branches or 10 branches within 10 minutes or 20 minutes. I haven't worked with the hardware-assisted DDoS protection in the Fortinet FortiGate; instead, I have worked with Radware or Arbor for DDoS solutions.
On a scale of one to ten, I rate Fortinet FortiGate a nine.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner