FortiGate

[njreynolds]

Hi

 

Has anyone had any recent experience of using FortiGate as a Firewall/Internet Filter?

 

I am currently trialing it, but just wondering if anyone else has used it recently and the option ?

 

Thanks

[speakercon]

I have used FortiGate's for a long time, I personally think they are great firewalls. The filtering does leave a little to be desired IMO but it does the job.

[Jcx500]

Get Firewalls , have recently started using the DNS filtering which is great also

[Oaktech]

My MSP uses Fortigate, for firewalling and loves them for that, but their filtering is barely fit for purpose and is not multi tenant scalable so uses netsweeper on top.

[Mr.Ben]

Great Firewalls (we have 40 of them) but terrible filters for education! Buy a cloud based service on top :-)

[2ilent8cho]

Ran Fortigate's since 2010, don't think I would entertain anything else. They have CPU's designed to perform for the task, unlike some others who just take an x86 off the shelf. The threat management is really good at blocking naughty people outside. They have signatures for active exploted threats, and you can even put signitures on specific services like RDP, you can say if more than 10 login attempts to RDP in less than 30 seconds drop all traffic for 30 days from that IP as they are up to no good. Can also notice port scanning, exploit scanning and put them on the banned IP's too.

 

Pair it with a FortiAnalyzer and you can get some good insights into your traffic.

 

You can occasionally get a buggy OS release, but its easy enough to roll back a revision if that happens.

 

We do now use Lightspeed for our filtering/ safeguard reporting as we needed a solution that filtered the iPads seamlessly with no login off site too.

[RLR]

We use Fortigate firewalls here and don't really have any issues with them. Filtering is good and they are quick to re-catorgorise websites if needed. We also have keyword search setup to email DSLs. We have offsite filtering setup so our student devices are filtered whilst they are not on the network using a PAC file and they have to login to authenticate.

[SchoolsBroadband]

We think Fortigates are great. We've been a partner of them for circa 10 years.

 

Yes, they are not education specific filtering solutions BUT if you put a cloud based reporting engine on top of them then its everything you need and more as well as being able to use all of their wonderful firewall technology as well of which they're Gartner market leaders with.

 

We've just launched our new education reporting platform which exports all syslogs from a FortiGate firewall, whether our own hosted cloud based solution or a physical onsite box whether its on our ISP network or not.

 

Check out https://www.schoolsbroadband.co.uk/e-safety-filtering-security/incident-management/ for more info.

 

Also FortiGate firewalls are full virtualisable. They are known in FortiGate language as a Virtual Domain (VDOM). We fully support this and have thousands of customers using them already in our cloud environment. All FortiGate firewalls have the options to use this. All sub 1000 series devices can only have a maximum of 10 VDOMs. Larger boxes can have up to either 250 or 500 VDOMs and there are licences charges to upgrade to more than 10.

 

If you need any further advice do send me a PM, I'd be happy to help.

 

Thanks

 

Dave