Fortinet network security products deliver outstanding functionality, ease of implementation and excellent cost-benefits. This is according to dozens of Fortinet customers from across the economic spectrum who posted their evaluations of the products on the Gartner Peer Insights review site.
Gartner’s Peer Insights is the research and advisory organisation’s platform for peer-driven ratings and reviews of enterprise technology solutions and products by genuine IT or end-user professionals. Gartner verifies every review before publishing to ensure its authenticity. Ratings of between one (lowest) and five (top) are based on several factors including overall evaluation, implementation, service and support.
Stefan van de Giessen, GM: network security at Fortinet distributor Networks Unlimited, says the major benefit of the Gartner Peer Insights is that the reviews enable IT professionals to cut through marketing hype and find out exactly what their peers think of a product they might be considering purchasing.
“Gartner actually solicits negative as well as positive feedback. So, for example, reviewers are asked what they disliked most about the product, how difficult it was to implement, and the level of service or support provided by the vendor or supplier,” he explains.
Gartner rates these Peer Insights User Reviews very highly, taking note of the reviews in its proven Interactive Magic Quadrant market and vendor evaluation methodology, together with the research and opinions of its own experienced and respected analysts.
“We are therefore extremely proud of the fact that of the 81 reviews of Fortigate’s New Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) posted in the past two months, 52 (64%) gave the product a five-star rating, and 26 (32%) awarded four stars,” Van de Giessen says.
Fortigate’s new secure SD-WAN product fared even better, with the product achieving only five- and four-star ratings (75% and 25% respectively) across the 28 reviews submitted to date.
SD-WAN – an acronym for software defined networking in a wide area network – is a new approach to network connectivity that is designed to lower operational costs and improve resource usage. It also allows network administrators to use bandwidth more efficiently and improves application performance without undermining security or data privacy.
However, although SD-WAN is growing in popularity – recent Gartner research found that over 40% of enterprises are expected to adopt SD-WAN by the end of 2019 – security concerns are high. More than 70 percent of executives who were surveyed stated that securing their SD-WAN was their top concern.
Nevertheless, the IT director of a $250-million retail company stated that Fortigate’s SD-WAN product was “really powerful and excellent”.