Moving the enterprise firewall forward

We had a bit of a win last week. CRNtech published a top-notch review of the FortiGate-620B, one of our more popular multi-threat security appliances among enterprises. We normally don’t like to brag about our products, but this is a project of which our R&D team can be very proud.

Naysayers in the past have expressed concerns that no company can do all things well; we’ve proven that wrong. Here are some examples from the review:

• What’s attention-grabbing about this device… is that it fights threats that have broken through the security perimeter of the average network, including threats posed by mobile devices that often pass through traditional security defenses.

• Fortinet has designed this device from the ground up, delivering the goods on both the hardware and the software fronts.

• The software is the latest, version 4.0’s. core technologies include firewall, Web content filtering, antimalware, intrusion protection, VPN (both IPSec and SSL) and two additional critical components: data leak prevention and granular application control.

• The management interface is well-designed, and full of information and configuration options… The management interface includes a series of widgets that can be added, changed and moved around offering complete customizability for the administrator.

• To help sift through the potentially dizzying array of options, the FortiGate’s management interface has intuitive help guides. The help topic relates to the specific area of the interface you are in, a feature that is so helpful and so woefully lacking in other UTMs we have tested.

We’ve worked hard. Thousands of Fortinet customers have already installed and upgraded to FortiOS 4.0 to take advantage of the enhanced security features outlined above. This is an appliance that can scale, as proven by the reviewer, our management interface is grade A.

While again this might be a bit boastful, I’m proud of our team. And thankful for our customers, for giving us the feedback and ideas needed to develop these products.