Fortinet Firewall Material

Fortinet make a wide range of security appliances that work in the Unified Threat Management (UTM) environment (a fancy way to describe the consolidation a number of security features that might be standalone in some cases into a single appliance). From what I can tell compared with other vendors out there, the FortiGates are priced fairly competitively and have a pretty good feature sets on models that scale from a small home office to a Telco's Central Office.  To be perfectly honest, the most important things to me is their portfolio is less about the firewall itself assuming that the top contenders are within the ball park of each other on capability and more about the management environment - specifically the FortiManager appliance which allows you to centrally manage a farm of FortiGates (maybe not such a big deal if you have a handful of these things) in the network and the FortiAnalyzer which provides a much richer level of detailed reporting capability than syslog alone provides.

Although that could be considered a bit of a sales pitch there, it was really just meant to be a quick and dirty introduction to the product lines before the proper posting itself - there's a lot of evaluation criteria that needs to be considered when identifying candidate products and I would strongly recommend you do that before selecting this or any other vendors products - so lets park any further hints of a pitch and make the assumption that you have a need to look after a cluster of these beasts, just like most vendors Fortinet have their own training and certification program.  Recently I attempted and passed the first level examination (Fortinet Certifiied Network Security Administator aka FCNSA).  There are training courses that can help but to be honest just doing the course on its own doesn't appear to touch all of the areas that the exam can hit - so the product documentation is definitely required reading and understanding - particularly the CLI reference guide and the Administation Guide as well as fiddling around with some of the boxes will make a huge difference.

I wasn't going to necessarily blog about this topic at all but during my revision I found a pretty good Network and Security blog that touches some of the topics you may find in the exam as well as general information that may be useful in your day to day operations, so I thought it may be worth spreading the word just that little bit more if there's someone interested in this area.