I find that with the proper experience using Fortinet FortiGate, the deployment process is quite straightforward. However, it does take some time to become familiar with the deployment tools like FortiManager. While FortiManager is highly beneficial, mastering it requires considerable time and effort since it operates differently than FortiGate. Therefore, you need to learn a new product in order to use it effectively. Also, a lot of technicians use that as an excuse to not learn it that well and continue to use Fortinet FortiGate, which kind of eliminates the purpose of FortiManager. The skill requirements for using FortiManager are somewhat high. This perspective is based on our Norwegian segment, where most of our customers have fewer than ten Fortinet FortiGate. In many cases, they likely don't need FortiManager at all.
The initial deployment takes days. There’s tuning and everything, but the initial deployment and getting it up in production is usually completed in days. Most of the time we actually do it in one day. After hours on a weekday, we usually deploy big Fortinet FortiGate for the biggest customers. We usually finish that before the next work day. The initial setup takes days, not weeks. Completing the setup completely is a continual thing, so that’s never really done because we’re fine-tuning everything all the time. It’s not something I can put a time estimate on.
It's easy to maintain, but it does require upkeep, as all security products do. You can't just deploy and forget about it. This is especially true for security systems, since new vulnerabilities and methods of exploitation arise every day. However, this is not unique to Fortinet; it's a reality across the entire industry. Keeping that in mind, maintaining a Fortinet FortiGate is still quite straightforward, and there are no significant issues in doing so.