Fortinet Enhances Firewalls

Fortinet Inc. today announced developments aimed at making life easier for users wanting to use its FortiGate and FortiWiFi firewalls to filter content.

The new FortiGuard Web Filtering Service” minimizes maintenance work by storing the database of URLs used to filter content off-site, in strategic hosting locations around the world.

“You don’t have to have the server at the customer’s site,” says Richard Kagan, Fortinet’s vice president of marketing. “You don’t have to update the server, and you don’t have to worry about keeping the database up to date.”

Up until now, Fortinet’s firewalls have incorporated home-grown anti-virus and intrusion detection and prevention developments. Content filtering has been provided via a partnership with Cerberian Inc., a software development and application services company. Its home-grown developments offer 80 different categories of content for filtering, compared to 52 under the previous offering.

Fortinet says it also makes life easier for its customers by charging a fixed price, based on the number of firewalls deployed by users. This differs from the pricing model used by some other players in the security space. Rival vendor Websense Inc. (Nasdaq: WBSN), for example, charges on a per user basis. Websense declined to comment on the FortiGuard announcement.— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum