When you say VM, Fortinet FortiGate-VM is essentially a firewall in a cloud, which is Fortinet on a cloud, eliminating the need for a physical apparatus or physical appliance to run this solution. In the old days, you required a physical box in your environment to install physically in your data center and configure that box and communicate with wherever you wanted to do. Now with Fortinet FortiGate-VM kind of a system, the physical appliance is no longer required. All you require is a cloud-based or a software firewall that you can utilize anywhere, anyhow. The advantage here is you can start the implementation within no time; as soon as the order is received and the tenant is ready to start implementation, you do not require a mandatory delivery time of six to eight weeks. This can happen within probably four or five days or maybe two days itself after the confirmed order. That is one of the biggest advantages of having a VM-based firewall because you do not require any physical configuration. You can do a virtual or a software configuration, and you can be in business within the shortest possible time. Customers appreciate that because the delay in terms of deliveries is no longer available. Either you can install it on customer premises or we can install it on a cloud also. Hybrid Mesh Firewall feature is beneficial because even if you have a Mesh Firewall, how it works is if you have an architecture designed in such a way that it will be controlled from centrally but utilized locally. You have a mesh of ten firewalls, but you are located at ten different locations and you want to go to the internet and you probably have a local gateway. In the older design, you have to come through a central location and then access your internet and go out, which becomes problematic because your latency would be very high. You will get a delayed response for anything and everything you want to access. However, with a meshed environment and a proper internet POP, you can have the standard controls implemented across. At the same time, since you are accessing the systems locally over the internet, the response time or latency is fast. That is one of the biggest advantages one gets with a mesh firewall and centralized management. I also speak about real-time threat response capability, and it is real time. You get fast access and people are happy because when they ask for any query, you get an immediate response rather than waiting earlier for a longer time. That is the advantage. Fortinet FortiGate-VM definitely improves overall security posture because it has better features in terms of better management or better configuration options and parameters. Any firewall cannot be configured with default parameters because it will probably give you issues. If you can configure it properly, and it has a GUI interface, the graphical interface actually helps you configure things much faster and in a better manner. One benefit with such VM-based solutions is that if you are connected to the internet, all the updates and all the threat intelligence platforms are always kept online and up to the mark. You do not have to wait for an update which will happen probably a week, ten days, or a month later. Whatever updates are required are instantly available. Therefore, threat detection, even if it is a zero-day, can occur in a much better way because if it gets updated at the central Fortinet level, it gets percolated directly to the firewall's database, making it a better option. I have been using Security Fabric Automation features to generate alerts or automate threat response because that is essential. When you have a fabric implemented, any issues with the firewalls can be immediately known, and you can take actions accordingly. That is a good feature.
