Talk:Fortinet/draft

Products
Fortinet develops and markets IT security and networking hardware and software. It is best known for the FortiGate family of security appliances, which combine many cybersecurity functions. According to a 2015 report by IT analyst firm The Dell'Oro Group, Fortinet had an eight percent market-share of the IT security appliance market by revenue in 2014, up from 2.9 percent in 2012. This makes it the fourth-largest vendor in the industry. According to Fortinet, its users are 35% small businesses, 28% enterprises and 37% large companies.

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FortiGate
Fortinet is best known for the FortiGate family of unified threat management physical and virtual appliances, which include a number of security features like firewalls, intrusion prevention, web-filters and protection from malware or spam. The family includes products for small businesses and branch offices like the FortiGate 20 and appliances for large enterprises, data centers and internet service providers, like the FortiGate-5000. It also sells products like the Fortigate-5001B, which is a Next Generation Firewall (NGFW), something Gartner defines as being a product that combines firewall, VPN, intrusion prevention and other security features in a single appliance.

Fortinet's first product was the FortiGate 3000, released in October 2002, which had a throughput of 3 gigabytes per second (GB/s). The 5000 family was released two years later. According to The International Directory of Company Histories, Fortinet's early products for small businesses and branch offices, were well received by the industry. A review in PC Magazine gave the FortiGate 100 network security and VPN appliance five out of five stars, though PC Magazine gave it only three stars. Network Magazine said the cost difference between a Fortinet appliance and purchasing each security function separately was "stunning," however it said Fortinet's spam tools were not as good as those from specialized anti-spam vendors.

Fortinet continued to release new controllers, features, and FortiGate firewalls for business of different sizes. Infoworld said the FortiGate 500 and 800 were easy to setup and was effective in a lab environment at detecting security threats. The publication gave it 8.1 out of ten stars. A review by Business Communications Review said the FortiGate 3000 was easy to configure and had good call quality, but its reliability was "problematic" and the security settings required excessive manual configuration for outbound calls. According to Federal Computer Week, the FortiGate 3600 appliance was effective and its user interface was easy to use. A lab test by Network Computing said Fortigate blocked 100% of security threats and was its top choice for "bang for the buck," but ranked it as a close second to the NetScreen ISG2000, which it said had slightly better technical performance. The FortiGate 3200D tied for first place in a test by NSS Labs on an "overall security-effectiveness assessment" and was the best performing product in a real-world test that mimics a data center environment. In a 2008 comparative review done by CRN, the publication said the FortiGate 1000A was "one of the most comprehensive" unified threat management appliances. It noted that Fortinet built its own appliances using dedicated security semiconductors, whereas most vendors use generic OEM parts. It ranked the FortiGate 1000A in second place, behind a WatchGuard product, giving it 4-5 stars in each category that was evaluated.

In early 2013, Fortinet introduced a family of firewall products for internal networks that relies heavily on special-purpose ASICs. The FortiGate virtual appliance was later added to the Amazon Web Services in 2014. In April 2016, Fortinet announced the Fortinet Security Fabric, which is intended to allow third-party devices to share information with Fortinet appliances and software through APIs. It also introduced the FortiGate 6040E 320Gbit/s firewall, which includes the new CP9 ASIC that takes on some processing tasks from the main CPU, and was used in future FortiGate releases.

Other
Fortinet provides numerous other software and hardware products, including: virtual versions of its appliances, security update subscription, data management software, and logging and reporting software.


 * Virtual versions of its appliances
 * The FortiOS operating system used in all of Fortinet's products
 * The FortiGuard subscription that provides security updates
 * The FortiManager data center management software
 * The FortiAnalyzer product family for logging, analysis and reporting
 * More than one dozen other products for switching, web security, desktops, messaging, VOIP services, DNS, user authentication and other applications'

FortiManager was first introduced in April 2003. That December, Fortinet released FortiOS 2.8, which added 50 new features to the operating system. The FortiClient VPN software was first released in April 2004. The operating system has been continually updated throughout the years. In October 2010, Fortinet released virtual software versions of its FortiGate, FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer and FortiMail appliances. It updated the FortiCloud management system in August 2015. A software-defined networking offering was introduced in September 2015.

Security
Fortinet produces and markets a database security and compliance product called FortiDB, a tool for managing security policies and vulnerabilities for databases. The product family was first started in 2008 with the FortiDB 100B. The FortiDB 1000C got 5/5 stars in SC Magazine and the FortiDB 1000D got 4 and three quarters out of five stars in the same magazine.

The first FortiMail messaging security product and FortiGuard antispam product were released in February 2005. The FortiMail 400B and FortiMail 200D each received five out five stars by SC Magazine. FortiWeb also produces the FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF), which focuses on security threats common to web applications and offloads certain tasks from web-servers.

FortiClient is an endpoint security product for desktops, phones, and other devices. It includes functions like anti-virus, malware protection, web filtering and VPN services. It received five out of five stars in PC Magazine. The publication noted that the software was free and could be used even without Fortinet products. It got high scores for phishing and malware detection, but was less effective at blocking new malicious URLs. A 2013 review of FortiClient 5.0 in SC Magazine gave it 4 and three quarters stars out of five. It said FortiClient was easy to implement and use, but many of its features required FortiGate appliances to be effective.

Networking and wireless
Fortinet produces and markets wireless versions of its FortiGate product called FortiWifi. Fortinet released the FortiWiFi 60 wireless access point in March 2004. The FortiWiFi 60 was the most expensive out of similar wireless units tested by VARBusiness, but also the most feature-rich and effective, according to the publication's review. SC Magazine gave the FortiWifi-40c 4.5 out of 5 stars. The publication said the appliance was affordable for small-office environments, but advanced configuration had a learning curve. Fortinet introduced a new family of cloud-based wireless access points, in August 2015.

Fortinet also sells application delivery controllers, which perform tasks like load-balancing to off-load the demand on web-servers. The FortiSwitch family of ethernet switches came out in 2009. The first Forti ADC (Application Delivery Controller) family was released in August 2013. This was followed by the FortiDDoS product family in March 2014.