Fortinet’s FortiGate 50E is a tough little desktop firewall. It’s nestled between the FG 30E and FG 60E in Fortinet’s expansive Fortigate line. It is considered an entry-point firewall, however, the FortiGate 50E is truly a multifunction appliance. Fortinet has really commandeered the SMB market with superb firewalls that get the job done on budget. They are highly popular because of their quick, simple installs, comprehensive security suites, and ease-of-use. As a result, even small businesses with little-to-no IT support are able to effectively secure their network. Of course, the FG 50E is a bit more robust than the 30E model. It contains two WAN ports for ISP redundancy, load balancing, etc., and five LAN switch ports. Moreover, starting with the 50E, you can select a device with an internal SSD storage disk for log retention (The FG 51E). The 51E contains an internal 32GB SSD drive for log storage. It’s very useful for troubleshooting purposes. Performance of the FG 50E The FG 50E clocks in at 2.5 Gbps Firewall Throughput and 220 Mbps NGFW Throughput. In addition, it pushes 160 Mbps Threat Protection and 100 Mbps of SSL/VPN Throughput. Easy-to-use The interface is very intuitive, and settings are very ‘findable.’ It’s certainly doable to configure for a novice. However, with a little know-how these devices can be deployed very quickly and seamlessly. Once you know where to look, the visibility into network traffic is amazing. FortiView provides information on traffic in and out of LAN/DMZ and traffic from the WAN interface. This gives you a good overview of the bandwidth used by device or by application, the category of the traffic, and the risk associated with the traffic. Also, you can look under Log and Report for real-time traffic, which policy is being used, application control and web filter triggered events. One of the really cool features of the FortiGate 50E is the Traffic Shaper. You can assign a high priority to VoIP traffic and a minimum amount of bandwidth to ensure you clients can hear you clearly and easily. Fortinet recommends the FG 50E for cases of UTM deployment in small offices, or as secure SD-WAN in Enterprise branch networks. In addition, it would also be ideal in stand-alone SMB networks with approximately 15-25 users and Internet speed connections of around 50-70 Mbps.
