Fortinet FortiGate-VM Reviews

FortiGate-VM is installed in our data centers and is used for site-to-site connections between offices. 

The most valuable features are site-to-site connections and UTM.

When new versions are deployed they tend to be a little buggy, so they should be more fully tested before release.

I have been using this solution for about a year.

We have had no issues with respect to stability, except that when new versions are released we do notice problems.

Scalability has not been a problem.

We have contacted technical support at times when the appliance was not working well and they were ok. We have no issues with support.

I also use Cisco equipment and the main difference is that Cisco is more expensive.

The initial setup is not very complex and involved only a few settings.

The deployment took us a couple of days.

We had assistance during our implementation and we were satisfied with the service.

The price of this product is great compared to others.

Overall, this is a good product with good features and priced well compared to others. It is GUI-based and I am happy with the interface. I would recommend it and cannot think of any changes that I would make. The only problem is that new releases tend to be a little buggy.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We are primarily using the solution on the VPN box as a perimeter firewall. We use it to secure internal networks and a few servers. Our network is solely on Fortigate.

The standard features, including the filtering, are quite good. All the basic features are pretty useful for us. 

It's very simple for us to use. 

It's very similar to SonicWall.

There isn't anything in terms of features that we find are lacking. We don't see any places on the solution that don't cater to our requirements.

I would like to see VNX security and WildFire. Those features I would like to see on the solution in the future in order to be able to evaluate it further.

I've been using the solution for two years.

The solution is pretty stable. 

We haven't attempted to scale the solution just yet. If we want to scale this solution we may have to look at other models. With certain requirements, we probably wouldn't be able to scale it so well as it is right now.

We have about 2,000 people using the solution. Most of the people using it are software developers.

The technical support has been very helpful. We've been satisfied with the level of the support we get.

We didn't previously use a different solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. We didn't find it complex at all.

We had partners that assisted with the implementation.

I'm not aware of the specific costs involved in the licensing of the solution. I don't know that prices are competitive enough compared to other vendors.

We did evaluate other options, including Cisco.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

I'd recommend the solution. I'd rate it eight out of ten.

Their support is very good. Fortinet has a good support base here who has been working closely with us. Whenever there is an issue that needs to be addressed to our end clients, we have received very good support. 

The product is quite user-friendly so we didn't have a lot of issues that needed to be addressed. 

The pricing structure is also flexible. 

Customization needs improvement. A lot of people have very unique requirements that they ask for at times. Everybody wants to get more out of the solutions so that they have more with less. I would like a little more customization, especially now that everything is becoming a lot more flexible with cloud-based deployments. A little more flexibility in terms of the offering that we can do or the bundling of products would help acquire markets much faster or much better.

I have been using FortiGate-VM for just under a year. 

It is definitely stable. We have not had a lot of support calls so, so far it is good. We have been pushing our clients to see whether they need additional support.

We want to organize more training and have a lot more awareness-building seminars and workshops. That is something that I think we can or we would be wanting to look at moving ahead. We haven't been able to organize a lot of that yet, but that is something that I think can help in many aspects is awareness, to be able to draw in and attract local talent who would be able to help with support.

Our clients are mostly enterprise businesses. 

We are a value-added reseller. The technical support primarily is coming from Fortinet because we are in the process of building up to provide the right service. Once we are comfortable then we will be again discussing with Fortinet that we are able to assume a greater role in providing the services locally or on-site from here.

We are still getting help from Fortinet for the deployment. We have been able to push this to two clients after we onboarded this. In the next couple of months, we believe that we will be able to take over the implementation and they can take a little more of a backseat. We want to be more independent, locally, with the local support and local team to be able to deploy it. We want to ensure that the service is seamless.

POCs are definitely the way to go because cyber-security is still in many cases new for many clients. Cybersecurity is a very wide arena in today's day and age. There is no one single solution, every day someone else is innovating some specialization in some form or another. Clients would like to see a proof of concept before they go on a large full-scale deployment. 

In the next release, I would like to have the possibility of being able to offer cyber-insurance with this because this is something that I think is completely unavailable at the moment here. This would add a whole new dimension. 

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

In terms of what features should be improved with Fortinet, I feel it should give better reports. They provide some basic reports in the entry-level and middleware products but I would love this product if they gave more reports, including more MIS from the traffic because they capture everything in the UTM. They don't produce a team value report. They don't produce a usable report where the IT manager, IT head or CTO can analyze where the attack happened or figure out where the bridge is down, etc. The reports are basic. There are engines which make everything on the GUI. All the user can potentially access for the risky function in the Fortinet but it should be on the GUI, it should not be behind the command line. They could definitely provide the FortiAnalyzer with the basic UTM in a bundle pack.

People should not have to ask for another FortiAnalyzer. It's an entry-level product. I understand that FortiAnalyzer is an expert level product but the functionality should be available at the entry-level as well. Fortinet should think about the entry-level and give it managing capabilities. That's why I selected Sophos because, for a small or medium office, all the reports are available there.

Secondly, Sophos is cost-effective. It is comparatively much cheaper. Sophos is available for a much cheaper price than Fortinet. Also, they have some other functions like sandboxing and others. FortiGate should be more customer-friendly and budgeted better. If I am a buyer, I do not want multiple appliances to manage. It should be one box, one appliance. One mobile should do everything. Multiple products require IT to create a workaround. You have to buy two products and then there is actually another one with that, one plus one, and then there is multiple management, so the product is definitely cumbersome. The beauty of the product is implementation and maintenance without it.

I have my own team to maintain this product. We are very happy as a Sophos user, as we get whatever we want from the reporting point of view. There are no glitches. There is no one issue in particular. When I ask, or my team asks, how the network is working and why there is network latency there are reports about where the traffic is going and I do not have the input after moving or switching to Sophos. I can get the support regarding which IP is working where and which IPs are making traffic, and more.

I have been personally using FortiGate-VM for two years.

We already procured Sophos. I already ordered two devices from our Indian partner.

We are now partners with Sophos. We were partners with FortiGate for the last year.

The first reason that we switched is because of our work use cases. We moved 80% of our infrastructure to AWS outsource. So we do not require a big firewall anymore. We are a 50 to 70 employee organization so a different firewall is required. We have a 310 exchange enterprise-level firewall. So we moved to 83210 Sophos. The reason why we are changing to different technologies is the comprehensive reports that Sophos provides at the very basic entry-level firewall. In the FortiGate, we have to also have another plan for data analyzer.

The second thing which I believe is that FortiGate has some special functions in the CLI (command-line interface) mode. Sophos does not support that and all its functions are on the UI. So it's easier management in Sophos compared to FortiGate. 

In terms of ease of use, if you implement FortiGate in your organization, you must have a FortiGate person who knows FortiGate and then three, four, or five years to learn to maintain the FortiGate device. Whereas Sophos doesn't require that much because all the things are on the UI. So anybody can understand it from the UI.

I can give you an example of the issue with UI. This is a basic thing. In the UI, you could go to the FortiGate console and work directly in the command. You can manage it from the command but you must have command line experience to manage the FortiGate device. If I want to see the traffic and where it goes and where it's from or any attack, in case of an attack, you need FortiAnalyzer to analyze, to track the packet, to protect the traffic. So that's easily available in other products like Sophos 83210. 

The cost of Sophos and other players is better compared to the FortiGate. FortiGate is a more important product in the industry. It is recommended, but the cost is also a major point in evaluating Fortinet's firewall solutions in our niche.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give it a 9. 

FortiGate is a nice and very good product but the implementation and post-implementation of the product are cumbersome. You have to manage four devices instead of two devices if I go for FortiAnalyzer. For a small, entry-level business, Fortinet should give the entire reporting on the UI so that end to end engineers can manage efficiently. So as technology is concerned, I give eight out of 10, but because of reporting, I would give five out of 10. I am just giving an example: if I know everything or you know everything but if you can't explain it, how do other people come to know that you know everything? FortiGate clearly captures each and everything for the backup capture and everything but it doesn't show what it is acquiring. Analytical reports are missing from there.

In our office, primarily everything goes through FortiGate. We expand that for all the firewall rooms that we have. We have features that link to FortiGate and from FortiGate on the shelf we ran the core cells. There is primary access to each of the devices and then we also use it between our offices. We use VPN tunnels in between offices. There are all of the typical settings within a firewall device: Protection, application control, and quality tracking.

There's routing and then there is control. For routing, there is quality. The security site has anti-virus and web filter applications. I'm used to all of them, so I wouldn't pick one or the other.

I like the traffic shaping feature. I find it helpful to be able to control the traffic.

The GUI could be improved. Furthermore, the unit we have could be modified because it's not that high of a torrent. 

It is a very stable product.

It is a scalable product. We source our current load with ease and I think it can handle a bit more. It definitely can handle a lot more capacity than what we currently use.

We do not use the tech support. We have another source for tech support.

We also considered Sophos, Checkpoint, and Palo Alto. 

We do have Palo Alto at one of our smaller offices of about 60 people. We noticed that Palo Alto is a much more costly solution.

We are using an IPS and an IDS at the moment. 

Before using Fortinet, the company had an attack (DDoS) from the outside and had many points of failure, when they started to use Fortinet, I think the attacks stopped. The DDoS attacks were no more. This was from 2015.

It is very useful to make lists for rules and prepare firewall rules.

It is stable. We have not had a bad experience with the Fortinet firewall.

Not really, but it does have it limits.

The technical support will reply quickly and everything will be okay.

The customer care center of Fortinet is good. For all the requests that we have done, they work as fast as possible, so this is a good point for Fortinet.

I have previously used pfSense (open source) before joining this company.

However, the company has been using Fortinet for a long time.

The first setup is easy and very simple. After that, you may require assistance implementing the new rules.

The price: It is a bit higher than the other competitors. This is why I started to look at other brands. For example, I am looking at Sophos firewall and whether it can meet our requirements, since I am sure that their price would be cheaper than Fortinet.

I would recommend a company to use Fortinet, because it is an attractive solution. No bugs with a very easy installation guide, and also the support and the customer care, are very important. 

Fortinet is a nice solution with economic interfaces and a very useful installation guide. Very nice customer care, too, but the price, it is sometimes very expensive.

I work with a lot of small business companies in Austria. Small businesses in Austria are from one to 100 employees. The FortiGate 60E is a top product for these Austrian companies for all cases of Internet usage.

There is an interesting possibility of building a tunnel to a firewall from access points. We use this feature for small branch offices with one to two employees with access to central RDP servers.

One top feature is the ability to use the appliance as a WLAN controller for up to 10 access points with the new 5.6 firmware.

Another top feature is the really good web interface and the classic Fortinet features, such as IPS, IDS, AV scanner, and spam filter.

At this time, I can't say anything against the device. It has been doing a great job.

In the first two releases of FortiOS 5.6, we had some trouble with the SSL VPN service. Sometimes it stopped working, and the IPS daemon too. Since 5.6.2, it has been running without any issues.

There are no problems with the scalability.

There are only two times that I had to contact Fortinet support since I have used Fortinet devices (15 years). Here in Austria, the distributor is doing a great job. It is very good to have the ability to contact an NSE 8.

For somebody who does not have experience with Fortinet appliances, the initial setup is very easy, but basic networking knowledge is necessary. The Setup Assistant will guide you through the first steps, and you can config basic settings for basic security.

The basic pricing in Austria is OK, but asking for special offers, e.g., NPOs, NGOs, trade up, and/or trade in, is always useful.

No, I did not evaluate other products.

Look for the latest OS version, read the release notes and the technical documents for comparison.

The improvement was felt in the traffic use. Without the firewall, there is unauthorized traffic coming in from the Internet. We can’t be sure whether it is legit traffic or something malicious. With this solution, all unauthorized traffic is filtered out.

The most valuable features are the firewall and security. They filter out unwanted connections.

We are using a product from eight years ago. I am sure there have been improvements in the newer versions. Improvements on the following are needed:

1. Responsive UI
2. JIT and detailed traffic reporting.

There are no stability issues.

We did scaled up quite well. We moved our locations from 10 to 20 people accessing it to 100s of people. It could handle the traffic load well enough.

I have not requested tech support (all these years).

No.

Initial setup was quite straightforward, as we can simply head to the required sections to apply the planned network.

I have yet to research a hardware replacement. If anything, I am the one that needs some advice!

I can't remember.

This product surely will fit your basic needs at the very least. However, always match up the specifications of the products you will buy to your current and future needs.