Five-star peer-review rating for Fortinet network security offerings 

Admin l Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2019

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – Fortinet network security products deliver outstanding functionality, ease of implementation and excellent cost-benefits. This is according to dozens of Fortinet customers from across the economic spectrum who posted their evaluations of the products on the Gartner Peer Insights review site. 

Gartner’s Peer Insights is the research and advisory organisation’s platform for peer-driven ratings and reviews of enterprise technology solutions and products by genuine IT or end-user professionals.  Gartner verifies every review before publishing to ensure its authenticity. Ratings of between one (lowest) and five (top) are based on several factors including overall evaluation, implementation, service and support. 

Stefan van de Giessen, General Manager: Network Security at value-added distributor Networks Unlimited, which distributes Fortinet throughout Africa, says the major benefit of the Gartner Peer Insights is that the reviews enable IT professionals to cut through marketing hype and find out exactly what their peers think of a product they might be considering purchasing. 

“Gartner actually solicits negative as well as positive feedback. So, for example, reviewers are asked what they disliked most about the product, how difficult it was to implement, and the level of service or support provided by the vendor or supplier,” he explained.  Gartner rates these Peer Insights User Reviews very highly, taking note of the reviews in its proven Interactive Magic Quadrant market and vendor evaluation methodology, together with the research and opinions of its own experienced and respected analysts. 

“We are therefore extremely proud of the fact that of the 81 reviews of Fortigate’s New Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) posted in the past two months, 52 (64 percent) gave the product a five-star rating, and 26 (32 percent awarded four stars,” Van de Giessen said. 

Fortigate’s new secure SD-WAN product fared even better, with the product achieving only five- and four-star ratings (75 percent and 25 percent respectively) across the 28 reviews submitted to date. 

SD-WAN – an acronym for software defined networking in a wide area network – is a new approach to network connectivity that is designed to lower operational costs and improve resource usage.  It also allows network administrators to use bandwidth more efficiently and improves application performance without undermining security or data privacy. 

However, although SD-WAN is growing in popularity – recent Gartner research found that over 40 percent of enterprises are expected to adopt SD-WAN by the end of 2019 – security concerns are high. More than 70 percent of executives who were surveyed stated that securing their SD-WAN was their top concern. 

Nevertheless, an IT Director of a US$250million retail company stated that Fortigate’s SD-WAN product was “really powerful and excellent”. 

“This project began with a proof of concept… but the solution worked so well that we accelerated the process,” the IT Director said, adding that the Fortinet product had been chosen ahead of four competitive vendor alternatives. It was the solution’s overall cost, together with the product’s customisation and scalability possibilities, that finally won the day. 

A network engineer responsible for infrastructure and operations in the education sector said the Fortinet product had proven to be a “simple SD-WAN solution to replace costly MPLS”. The organisation was also “able to do way more than we could with our previous solution” thanks to the number of features available in the offering. 

“Efficient use of bandwidth”, along with more stable coverall connections and efficient traffic flow, were some of the benefits of the Fortigate SD-WAN reported by a Director of Technology Services in a US$500m construction company, while a network engineer responsible for infrastructure and operations in a US$1billion company praised the product’s ease of ease of use and setup, with an interface that is “intuitive and easy to get around”. 

“Why did I wait so looong?” asked the IT Director in the Financial industry, stating that the Fortinet product was “a 100 percent improvement over my prior firewall.”   

Many of the reviewers also commented on the product’s simplicity, high performance and functionality, which, notes Van de Giessen, could be attributed in part to the fact that Fortinet is the only NGFW vendor to provide native SD-WAN along with integrated advanced threat protection to secure distributed networks from advanced cyberattacks. 

“In addition, Fortigate NGFWs utilise purpose-built security processors and threat intelligence security services to deliver high performance and outstanding protection of all network traffic, including encrypted traffic. This is important because, according to Gartner estimates, some 80 percent of enterprise traffic is already encrypted and 50 percent of enterprise attacks are hidden in encrypted traffic,” he added. 

The high-performance Fortigate NGFWs also make it easier for enterprises to achieve adaptive security by intelligently segmenting their IT assets according to business intent, and by having multiple enforcement points and an integrated and consistent security policy across on-premise and cloud assets. 

Another reviewer responsible for infrastructure and operations in a government education environment stated that the Fortigate NGFW delivered “the best cost-benefit in the market”. A senior network engineer in the finance industry praised the product for its “great implementation … and next generation capabilities” that delivers “so much information right at your fingertips”. 

“Excellent quality, fantastic reliability, ease of use and amazing support,” concluded an IT Security professional in the manufacturing industry, who added that the key factors that drove his organisation’s decision to invest in a Fortigate NGFW was its overall cost, and product functionality and performance.