Fortinet FortiGate IPS Reviews

I'm a reseller with clients in industries ranging from healthcare to banking and manufacturing. My customers use FortiGate IPS for network protection and segmentation. 

I like FortiGate's zero-trust capabilities and protection against zero-day threats. Zero-day threat protection is critical because we're seeing constant changes in the threat landscape. The sandboxing and web access controls are also robust. 

FortiGate IPS is somewhat pricey compared to other solutions. There is also room for improvement in terms of the radio signals. The FortiGate WiFi has a relatively short range. I've found there is a lag in its zero-day malware response that could be better, and FortiGate could integrate better with other brands of equipment or identity management solutions.

I have used FortiGate IPS for more than five years.

I rate FortiGate IPS nine out of 10 for stability. When we've had problems with the platform, they were mostly configuration issues, not the fault of the product itself. 

I rate FortiGate IPS eight out of 10 for scalability, but we haven't scaled it up that much. We would have a better idea of its scalability if we used it on a bigger project. We can say with certainty that FortiGate is scalable enough for the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises. 

Most of our clients are small and medium-sized companies, but we do some smaller projects on the enterprise side, like consultation and subcontracting. 

I rate Fortinet support eight out of 10. They're generally quite good, but sometimes the response is slower than I would like. When you're paying for support, you usually expect a response in a day or so, but it took Fortinet two or three days to address an issue once. That was the only time I got a slow response. They are usually much quicker. 

Positive

I rate FortiGate IPS eight out of 10 for ease of setup. We do on-prem and cloud deployments. It's a hybrid cloud setup where we install FortiGate on virtual machines from AWS. We can typically deploy FortiGate in a day. It might take two days if our client needs a lot of configuration work. 

I rate FortiGate IPS two out of 10 for affordability. It's more expensive than competing solutions. It ranges between $1,000 to $7,000 depending on the model. They offer one-year or three-year licenses. 

I rate Fortinet FortiGate IPS eight out of 10. If you're already using Fortinet, I recommend staying with it. However, if you want to reduce your costs, you can consider other solutions like SonicWall, Sophos, or Palo Alto. Fortinet is an excellent cybersecurity solution, but it's expensive.

This is an appliance. It is hardware. It's for intrusion detection mainly. It can do routing and switching yet focuses mainly on detection and prevention. 

The most valuable features are the fact that one device can do multiple tasks, such as both routing and firewalling.

It had a good web interface.

You have access to CLI in case you have no web access. 

Technical support has been helpful overall, even though we haven't used them much. 

It's a bit more complex to configure in comparison to Cisco.

The learning curve is a bit higher. 

It's not the least expensive solution on the market. 

We've only had a few issues and everything was solved very fast. We are satisfied with the level of support on offer. 

I've also used Cisco. These solutions are not quite the same. 

I've also used MicroTik, which is slightly less expensive. 

The pricing is okay. In comparison, MicroTik offers better pricing yet has the same functionality. Therefore, it is a bit more of an expensive option.

I'm a customer. We have the drives in our server room.

I'd rate the product eight out of ten. 

We have to use Fortinet for the data center. We filter all the entries and all the requests towards servers in the data center, so we've set up Fortinet to receive all the requests and check them before sending them to the servers.

The fact that Fortinet FortiGate IPS can prevent and log malicious intrusions, tries, and attempts is great. We can replace them and check the logs to see what happened.

The speed of the detection could be improved. The prevention mechanisms and implementation are not easy and could be better. In addition, filtering and IDS could be added.

We have used this solution at my organization for over ten years. The biggest version we have is the 500E. But we have 60E and a lot of mid-range SMB firewalls, including DC ones using 500E. It is deployed on-premises.

We have no issues with stability.

It is scalable. 

We escalated a lot of technical issues during the deployment. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We completed the deployment by ourselves, and it took a lot of time to deal with the main data centres. The deployment took us more than nine months. We have 100 people using Fortinet FortiGate IPS in our organization, and our clients have more than 5000 users. It does not require a lot of maintenance.

We went with Fortinet FortiGate IPS because they're the best according to Gartner.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice, prepare and ensure that the Fortinet product you choose is suitable for your situation and use case.

We have a Cisco ASA firewall. We have it at the border of the network in front of the internet. With FortiGate, we put it in the middle, then it works behind our server farm to protect our server farm from attacks, from viruses.

It is a strong firewall. 

The product offers many features. 

There has been no attack on our servers after we configured the FortiGate IPS. No more attacks are coming. We are very secure.

The initial setup is very easy.

I have found the solution to be stable. 

It's possible to scale the solution. 

So far, everything has been good for us. We haven't had any issues. 

While the security is good, we'd always prefer if it was even better to ensure protection.

I have three years of experience with the solution. 

It is a very stable product. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution can scale well. 

We have five engineers using the solution. 

A lot of medium and even small companies use the solution in our country.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

If we run into issues, we can contact support. They are helpful and responsive. 

Positive

We used Cisco ASA IPS as our old IPS. It was old, and we needed a newer product. We also liked the FortiGate support of the UTM feature. It allows for the inspection of Layer 7 in a more effective way than Cisco ASA. It is advanced. FortiGate is very, very advanced.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It is not a complex process. 

The deployment is quick. It only takes a couple of minutes.

We have two people that can handle any maintenance tasks. 

We search for details and watch videos and are able to handle the process by ourselves. It's a solution that's easy to learn.

We bought the solution three years ago, and it came with five days of training from the local company. It cost us around $73,000 for three years. 

It's expensive, however, compared to Cisco, it's not too expensive. 

I'm an end-user.

We are using the latest version of the solution. 

I'd recommend the product to others. 

Our company uses the solution to prevent traffic that is not supposed to be traveling through our firewalls. When we find log issues, we easily fine tune the IPS to block that traffic so it cannot penetrate our environment. 

We have 300 users in a hospital-to-hospital environment where traffic is transmitted through the firewall and intercepted by the IPS for monitoring. 

The solution effectively blocks unwanted traffic. 

It would be helpful to have a better tool for migrating all policy rules using an automatic script. The current tool does not place entire configurations in their desired locations. It takes time to manually configure for compatibility across different platforms or vendors. 

I have been using the solution for five years. 

The solution is very stable. 

I have not needed technical support. 

We migrated from Cisco to the solution. 

The setup is simple and straightforward. Knowledge-based documents are available and useful for setups. 

We implemented the solution in-house. We migrated from Cisco to the solution so it was more of a deployment situation. 

We had some deployment challenges but managed to overcome them. It took an entire day to get the environment running because we could not use the scripting tool for naturals so had to do them manually. 

There is no ongoing maintenance because the solution is not a device, but rather  a software blade provided as a checkpoint within FortiGate. 

The pricing is based on a licensing model for each IPS in your environment. The solution is included as part of the IPS license and automatically updates to the latest version when firewalls are updated. We are currently on a three-year licensing model. 

The solution is a good tool to have in place. Most vendors provide a software blade with their firewalls but it is disabled because it uses too much CP or memory. It is important to enable the tool every time to prevent environments from being intruded by attackers or threats. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.  

Fortinet FortiGate is used as an inline intrusion prevention tool to detect and scan ongoing connections and data. It will take action, either by blocking or intimating in real-time.

Fortinet FortiGate's most valuable features are the UTM package which provides internet blocking restrictions and load balancing. Additionally, the solution is easy to use and the security reporting is good. The security fabric which they have launched Fortinet FortiGate IPS, it's very good in terms of giving details.

Fortinet FortiGate can improve performance. There was a huge challenge in terms of CPU and memory where the IPS engine would keep triggering. There were random spikes of overutilization in the CPU and memory resources. They have to work on CPU and memory stability considering these IPS engines. A few versions were very unstable.

The current Fortinet FortiGate IPS package has only standard options. If they could work around optimizing those packages for different needs it would be better. There might be a media company, or banking organization, which needs a different set of signatures and different bundles on priority. If they could segregate that in terms of organization and needs, or at least institutional-wise segregation, that could be great. 

I have used Fortinet FortiGate within the past 12 months.

Fortinet FortiGate could improve the stability, we used different versions and they were unstable over time which caused an overall device error.

The scalability of Fortinet FortiGate is a challenge. However, the cloud version is easy.

I have had to use the support a number of times when we had overutilization of resources.

I rate the support from Fortinet FortiGate a six out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup of Fortinet FortiGate was easy. This is a common feature across Fortinet devices.

There is a license required to use Fortinet FortiGate with all the features. It has to be updated with the threats on an ongoing basis for the signatures to prevent threats and a license is needed to receive those security updates.

The price of the solution is worth it for the features.

My advice to others would be to have Fortinet FortiGate optimized. It is a good tool to be switched on and used in a live production environment. It is important to optimize rather than directly use the pro package, the full IPS package provided by the vendor. 

Fine-tuning the solution according to the organization's needs will help in optimizing the utilization of CPU and memory because the whole bundle has too many features which might not be needed for the organization. Enabling the solutions and running it on the first default mode and then optimizing it using the customized package, would help a lot in stabilizing the device.

I rate Fortinet FortiGate an eight out of ten.

Our infrastructure includes both FortiGate (81E series) and Cisco Meraki appliances, and we have fully integrated FortiGate IPS with these devices. Essentially, whenever I secure the WAN and LAN and enhance them with security profiles, I will use the IPS's Web Filtering and Application Control features.

The most useful feature of FortiGate IPS for me is Application Control.

FortGate's IPS reporting could be made better by giving more details regarding the source and destination of network traffic when it comes to the overview section. This would allow me to more easily follow the flow of traffic based on IP addresses, without having to integrate the IPS with other products that perform more sophisticated traffic analysis.

Another improvement, that may only tangentially relate to the IPS, would be to include more functionality and details regarding SD-WAN (such as the ISDB), in order to make it more secure.

I've been using Fortinet FortiGate IPS for about seven years. 

The stability is fine, but it would be even better if we were to deploy another appliance for higher availability of access, such that there is no downtime at all.

The scalability of the IPS fits my current needs well. If we were to take on more users, however, we would likely have to change both our appliance and the license.

The support is good because, although the response time for tickets may occasionally take some time, at the end of the day they have always solved the issue at hand. What is also nice is that they can connect with you remotely and help support you at any point.

Positive

The setup was easy for me because I deploy appliances off all kinds and sizes, large and small. I would give the setup a 4/5 in terms of ease.

I pay €1,200 per year for the license along with Fortinet's 81E firewall appliance. I would rate this pricing as 3/5 stars, and I believe the price is reasonably similar to its competitors in the market, being somewhere in the middle.

Given my experience and the fact that FortiGate are a leader in the market, I would rate FortiGate IPS a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for security reasons. It's our wall between the inside to outside. That's why we are using it. We use it for VPNs also. People who work outside of the office use the VPN through the firewall, for example.

The solution is quite stable.

The solution can scale.

We have good local support.

The interface could be better.

We would like the initial setup to be a bit easier.

It isn’t missing any features. We’re pretty happy with it.

I’ve been using the solution for two years.

It’s very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn’t crash or freeze. It’s reliable.

While the solution is scalable, we don’t need to scale it for our operations.

We have about 80 people on the solution right now.

We have a local company that assists us with support when we need it. They are pretty good.

The solution is pretty easy to set up. However, you do need some previous knowledge. It helps if you understand the environment. It’s not hard per se, however, it can be a bit tricky. We’d like it if it was a bit easier.

I can’t speak of how much the cost of the license it. I don’t have any details in relation to the pricing.

I am a customer and end-user.

I’m not sure which version of the solution we’re using.

It is a good solution. I’d recommend it to others.

Overall, it’s a good solution, and I would recommend it to others.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.