What is our primary use case?
I use the solution in my company, as we mostly load some web applications at our data center and use it to ensure that the web pages are properly secured.
What is most valuable?
Actually, most of the features of the tool are really good, but I would like to emphasize the importance of its machine learning features, as it can be implemented smoothly in Fortinet FortiWeb, and it is very helpful for our company.
What needs improvement?
Though the reporting is a nice aspect associated with the tool, I feel that it has certain shortcomings and can be made better. The reporting part can provide more information and be more specific.
Fortinet FortiWeb's admin guide could offer more, like, examples or features on how to implement the tool. It can provide information on how a user can make use of it in different usages, and that can help a lot. The admin guide is satisfactory, and it meets our company's needs.
Actually, my company would like it if the product could implement scanning attachments for exchange for assets or exchange needs. The aforementioned area consists of the feature that my company wants to apply, but it is not supported in Fortinet yet. My company needs the product to support us in the aforementioned area, and it can help us a lot by providing a layer of security that can check files and attachments in emails and other stuff, which would be great.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Fortinet FortiWeb for three years. I am an end user of the solution.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
In terms of stability, it is a good solution that is easy to use and has many features and resources. The support offered by the product is good, especially since the support team responds on time, keeps you informed, and even follows up. Generally, it is a good solution to have and use.
My company has not experienced any downtime while using the product.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In our company, we have not implemented the product on a large scale.
Around 2,000 people per month use the product in our company.
Every single day, the tool is used to host web applications.
If our company needs to implement more hosted web servers, we will use Fortinet FortiWeb, but if not, then it will remain at the current number. Increasing the use of the tool is not my decision, and I just accommodate the needs of the organization.
How are customer service and support?
The solution's technical support is good. When my company faced some problems with the product, I found the solution's support team to be very supportive and helpful. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
On a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the product's initial setup phase as eight or nine.
The product's initial setup phase was straightforward, and since our company didn't have any problems with it, we didn't encounter many problems with the tool. Maybe our company encountered some problems with the product's setup because we used to use it to set up the servers or stuff, which took time, but now Fortinet FortiWeb handles everything smoothly and easily.
The solution is deployed on an on-premises version.
The solution can be deployed in a week.
What was our ROI?
If my company did not have Fortinet FortiWeb, then I believe that we would have had to host some of the services in an external data center with extra fees and there we would have had to pay for the web services, but we don't need that anymore because now, we have an on-prem web service that can promote us to be able to host as much as we need of web services.
On a scale of one to ten, where one is zero percent and ten is a hundred percent, I rate the ROI as an eight.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
If one is very cheap and ten is very expensive, I rate the product price as three or four. The tool is cost-effective and offers value for money. I didn't mean it was very expensive. The price is fixed, but some features need an extra license.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
My company was considering F5, but you actually went for Fortinet FortiWeb after considering the cost aspect.
What other advice do I have?
My company doesn't specifically host e-commerce platforms since we offer mainly government services.
The security part has been satisfactory till now, and we haven't faced any problems yet.
FortiGate FortiWeb's features that have been most effective in mitigating web-based threats are possible because of the signatures. My company doesn't need to enforce a lot of policies or stuff. Fortinet FortiWeb has a lot of internal databases that can help you, and you can use whatever platform you are hosting your web applications through whichever software you use. it can build up a web protection profile that matches your needs, making it a very helpful tool.
Speaking about how machine learning features enhance our security posture, I would say that some aspects of the website are not normally clear for our company, and machine learning helps in such areas. It just traces the normal usage of the web applications along with the websites or links most users visit while also checking which URLs are mostly used, after which the tool differentiates between the normal usage and any abnormalities, based on which it builds the model that can be used to improve the security. Sometimes, a person cannot do things manually and is not sure about all the aspects of our web applications because many are not developers. Machine learning comes into the picture because one may not know all the stuff associated with the product.
A team of four or five people is enough to deploy the tool. Maintaining the tool is actually not a very big task and not many people are required for it.
The integration capabilities of the product with other security tools have benefited our company's security strategy as it sits smoothly in our network. The tool doesn't cause any problems with the integration part.
I would recommend that users use the tool's high availability. With the tool, one box is not enough, so there is a need to have a cluster of two boxes. Users need to measure their needs regarding the logging process and everything else, including processing. Even before starting to use it, we have to set up everything, or you would be confused about how to use the tool in the future, and it would be difficult to figure out how much retention log retention we would need in our company. It is important to set up everything related to the users' needs so that they don't need to change a lot of settings in the future.
I rate the tool an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
*Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.