Fortinet UTM: Product Overview and Analysis

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Key Takeaways

Fortinet offers a range of UTM products as part of its FortiGate and FortiCloud lines, with prices starting as low as $400. The company is “the clear leader” in the UTM market, says Gartner, and a “good shortlist candidate for all SMBs.” Fortinet gets high marks for pricing, performance, and an impressive threat intelligence team, while the management console, cloud management, malware prevention and support have room for improvement.

Company Description

Publicly traded Fortinet was founded in 2000, launched its first FortiGate firewall in 2002 and completed its IPO in 2009. It provides network security appliances for carriers, data centers, enterprises and distributed offices with a mission to secure and simplify the IT infrastructure.

Product Description

Fortinet offers a range of UTM products underpinned by the Fortinet Security Fabric, an adaptive architecture providing integrated detection and automated responses to cybersecurity threats. Its FortiGate and FortiCloud range provide high-performance, multi-layered security and unified visibility with ease of management. The appliances leverage dedicated security processers and provide additional capabilities, such as a wireless access point controller, switch controller, and integration with other elements of the Fortinet Fabric (endpoint agents, sandbox appliances and fabric partner solutions).

Software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) capabilities are also included in the appliances, as well as next-generation firewall (NGFW), intrusion prevention system (IPS), anti-virus, Web filtering, content filtering, data loss prevention (DLP), virtual private network (VPN) tunnel endpoint (SSL & IPSec), SSL inspection, and advanced threat protection. Units for larger sites support multiple WAN interfaces with load-balancing and failover capabilities.

Fortinet has more than twice the UTM revenue of its closest competitors, and is also growing faster.

“Fortinet is seeing increased consolidation of both security and networking capabilities into the UTM platform,” said Peter Newton, senior director of product marketing at Fortinet. “The latest features to be integrated into the UTM fold are SD-WAN capabilities.”

Markets and Use Cases

These UTM products are used in main campus, branch, and distributed locations.?They are deployed as general-purpose edge firewalls, internal segmentation firewalls and security-specific applications. They are more suitable to the small and midsized market than the large enterprise space.

Metrics

According to IDC, Fortinet shipped more UTM devices than the next three competitors combined. FortiGate firewalls are consistently recommended in NSS Labs’ independent testing.

Intelligence

Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs is a large cybersecurity research organization. It uses a variety of tools, including machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), to discover and defeat malware. FortiGuard threat intelligence is the foundation for the protections delivered by FortiGate Firewalls, along with additional security solutions integrated within the Fortinet Security Fabric.

Delivery

Fortinet offers UTMs in a variety of form factors, including physical and virtual appliances, and in the major public clouds (AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, Oracle).

Agents

Fortinet UTM does not require agents, but Fortinet offers endpoint agents that provide more comprehensive security.

Pricing

A variety of UTM products are available. Prices start at $400.