Fortinet has been a darling of the stock market ever since its IPO in 2009 as its stock price has accelerated over recent years.
Its stock performance has mirrored the adoration that its line of
security devices consistently receive. Fortinet is the current UTM
market leader, boasting a 20% market share.
Fortinet is now expanding out of its core SMB strength and into the
large enterprise market where the increasing performance of its
solutions are making it attractively priced.
In Gartner’s latest Unified Threat Management Magic Quadrant (UTM) Fortinet is listed at the top of the leader quadrant.
Says Gartner, “We believe attributes that contributed to the leadership
position include Fortinet’s high awareness in the industry, in Gartner
client’s short-lists and in competitive situations; Fortinet’s
aggressive price/performance.”
A UTM or Unified Threat Management device is a firewall that includes
other features as well. The Fortinet UTM package includes gateway
firewall, anti-virus, web filter, intrusion protection, application
control, VPN, email filtering and WAN optimization. Think of it as the
“Everything Box.”
There line of UTM security appliances is called the Fortigate
series. It offers an appliance to meet every type of network, from the
home office to large enterprise networks, as well as Managed Security
Service providers. Its smallest unit, the Fortigate-20C,
also serves as a wireless router and offers four internal switch port
in addition to a WAN port. At the top of the food chain is its new 5000 Series
chassis based network appliance. It supports two, six, or fourteen
FortiGate-5000 series network security blades, and allow you to scale
security and customize your unique environment. These large units are
ideal for virtual infrastructures as they can control up to 3,000
virtual domains.
The admin console for the Fortigate is browser based. Sometimes,
browser based can have a cheesy rudimentary look but not with the
Fortigate. Navigating the Fortigate is simple with its expandable
menu. The admin console opens up to a Dashboard which displays a series
of widgets that the administrator can populate according to their
needs. It also comes with a command line interface which can be
accessed through the admin console itself or through Putty.
Like all UTM appliances, the Fortigate units do some things better
than others. Its web filtering is certainly more than suitable for most
environments but if you are looking for super high granularity with a
complicated array of user based filtering and exceptions, you probably
would be better suited with a dedicated filtering appliance. The same
probably holds true for its email filtering as well.
With this in mind though, what IT professionals are looking for first
and foremost in a UTM device is security, and this is what Fortinet
does best. Configuring the firewall of the Fortigate is a breeze.
Simply create your firewall objects, consolidate them into groups if
possible, and then create your policy rules. You can right click on any
of your policies to view a separate context menu that will allow you to
do things such as delete, move or edit the policies.
Integrating the other core components with your firewall policies is a
snap. Simply apply the various UTM services you desire to the
designated policies. For example, you would enable email filtering only
to the rule configured for email traffic. You would then configure web
filtering for the rule regarding your HTTP and HTTPS traffic while you
would apply anti-virus to both rules.
Backing up and restoring your Fortigate configurations is as simple
as clicking a single link and can be completed in less than a minute.
Fortinet is continually releasing new builds and updates for all of its
models. Simply download these firmware upgrades to any local device and
click the update link and browse to the downloaded updates. You can
revert back to an older firmware release at any time. Some of the more
robust Fortigate models can be clustered into active-active or
active-passive configuration.
Fortinet recently released version 5 which among other things
includes Mobility Management. This feature does not include an
additional license and is ideal for those organizations who allow BYOD
devices.
If you browse some of the UTM discussion boards out there, you will
find the phrase, “can’t beat it for the price” when discussing the
Fortigate. The combination of its strong UTM features with a very
affordable price point should certainly put Fortinet on the short list
for any organization shopping for a new UTM appliance.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Great review Brad.
Only for the part related to upgrades from one version to another, I think you are a bit too optimistic :-)
Sometimes the update (and rollback) are not devoid of hassles (including parts of the configuration that not always work "as they are" in the new firmware).