Fortinet FortiGate vs. VMware SD-WAN

We reviewed many different vendors product offerings, we found the Fortinet FortiGate to best fit our needs. We upgraded from a previous firewall, the migration was a fairly easy process. We were also able to consolidate multiple firewalls into one unit using vdoms. It's been helpful to have one pain of glass, one support contract and easy to work with support. These firewalls are feature rich which is great, but the support contracts are expensive.

Incentivized

VeloCloud was the #1 choice out of various POCs performed when migrating off of MPLS into an ADI/public internet circuit environment. Their ability to also be top of rack with certain software vendors played a major role in improving user experience. Their dynamic DMPO and circuit load balancing can cause some challenges when working with other entities that use a static whitelisting service for access to resources.

Incentivized

• It is the most reliable NGFW that we have ever been touch with it.
• You can easily upgrade the firewall cluster firmware without user attention!!!
• User IDentity based feature is fantastic and intrusion prevention just works with least false-positive possible.
• Very reachfull and intuitive GUI, just love it

Incentivized

• Ease of setup: after unpacking the device, you can have your VC appliance up and running within minutes.
• Now that VMWare owns the Velocloud solution, I believe that they will be able to invest in the product to say fresh and ahead of the competition.
• The technical support is one of the best I have ever interacted with and continue to follow up until the issue is resolved.

Incentivized

• When we switched to Fortinet Fortigate, it took some time getting used to and become familiar with the new interface. Being used to strictly command-line interfaces, a full GUI-based firewall was something brand new. Careful planning had to be done when creating rules to ensure we didn't miss anything. However, once we got used to the new GUI interface, going from one Fortinet product to another was simple, as Fortinet used the same interface for all of its devices.

Incentivized

• VMware SD-WAN could provide cli access for troubleshooting
• VMware SD-WAN boxes could have more ports
• VMware SD-WAN box could have more applications to provide more health and visibility of the traffic passing through

Fortinet's products have kept improving with new software releases and they continue to deliver great value. Their support is also very good. I believe that as a small enterprise, their products have given us competitive advantage delivering features and functionality that enable us to innovate and do things better. They also continue to be a leader in the markets they serve.

Incentivized

The user interface shared among many simultaneous users is very easy to get around. With shared favorites among users, most tasks are easily bookmarked and can quickly be found and edited. Their strategy for web filter integration is easy to understand and manage as well. With some general direction, setup and maintenance were easy to do and easy to teach others in the organization to do as well.

Incentivized

VMware SD-WAN has great usability. We have had a positive experience with the solution. It has helped solved a number of issues with our network such as visibility in user usage, application usage, and prioritizing critical application network traffic. VMware SD-WAN user interface is also very easy to understand and configure.

Incentivized

We had didn't any hardware failures at our two main office locations and upgraded our units last year after using them for about 5-6 years

Incentivized

Good performance and really good integration. We have integration with Microsoft AD.

Incentivized

We live in Turkey. Fortinet's Turkey office [dealt] constantly with us in our every problem or our experience. In addition, global support teams also supported every ticket we opened in every problem we encountered. They support innovative approaches and evaluate and offer solutions. In this context, they were very supportive of the problems we encountered in previous versions.

There are still some glitches that need to be worked out. As an example, I rebooted a device at one of our branch locations and it just died. That should never have happened, and I've only seen this happen when a company needs to improve hardware on some of their lower-end models.

Incentivized

I received it a couple years afters use it and it was just to confirm my knowledge about the tool.

Incentivized

Make sure that you have the most current version of FortiOS. Make sure all Fortigates are on the same version

Incentivized

One of the biggest advantages over competitors that Fortinet FortiGate leverages well is its remote virtual private networks options. Licensing is included with Fortinet FortiGate units at no extra cost. We find that the telemetry is easier to compile and most importantly communicate with non technical members of staff. The Fortinet FortiGate unit is also extremely stable for long periods of time without showing signs of needing a reboot.

Incentivized

We preferred the features and UI of the Velocloud compared to FortiGate SDWAN. They seemed to offer the same sets of information in different layouts. Our company decided on Velocloud for personal/aesthetic reasons. They offered a more concise set of graphs and tables out of the box for us. SD WAN provided us a with a broader look into our connections with a more robust view, which Velocloud backed by Vmware, gave us.

Incentivized

My environments are pretty small (less than 100 users per location) so no issues here.

Incentivized

• SD-WAN : Can't stress it further that we are very happy with this functionality and outcomes in the org. We have multiple WAN and MPLS links and traffic switching becomes an important in order to utilize the best performing line.
• QoS : We use QoS for almost all internet traffic, be it Web browsing by users, IOT segment, Application based traffic policy and VIP and normal user based bandwidth allocation.
• SSL and IPSec VPN, both features are fully used to it absolute capacity. IPSec tunnels with multiple sister companies across globe.

• We are able to save thousands per month by eliminating MPLS from our monthly service.
• We were able to convert the cost of VeloCloud to an operational expense by renting through our ISP.
• We have been able to eliminate downtime in situations which would have normally taken our branches offline, preventing us from servicing customers.

Incentivized