Preface

Reliable documentation resources are always needed when dealing with recent and innovative technologies and paradigms. This book was born as a response to the need of having a document that could cover Fortinet’s flagship product FortiGate in detail.

The story goes like this: around 2008 two of the book authors (Martin Hoz and Ken Tam) were together at a company meeting, both being already Fortinet employees. A conversation popped up about the need of a technical book on Fortinet products. To that point there was no general book about Fortinet on the market and several times we had people asking for something that could cover the technology and the UTM paradigm in general. Couple years had past, the book idea went dormant mainly due to busy work schedule, but it remained as part of the to-do list for both of them. As of 2010, Fortinet CTO Michael Xie had brought up the idea of having a published book on Fortinet key selling product FortiGate during one of the FIAT meetings, where Martin was a member of, along with other two co-authors of this book. FIAT is the Fortinet Innovation Advisory Team, a group of individuals that assist the Fortinet CTO Office on defining Research and Development direction. Since Ken Tam already had some experience with co-authoring a book with a previous employer, a company that was also founded by the brothers Michael & Ken Xie, this idea was brought to Ken’s attention thus began the book development. The initial thought was the book would need at least a third author, and so Ken McAlpine, a technical genius that had to deal with some of the most complex FortiGate deployments, joined the project which officially started on Summer 2011. What nobody had planned was the amount of workload that takes to write a book combining activities with a main day job that was so demanding due the growth rates Fortinet had been experiencing since its IPO. The team asked Bruce Matsugu to help on reviewing and commenting the manuscripts but then the point was reached where it was necessary to also add him as an author, along with another Fortinet veteran, Rick Basile, who also expressed interest on the project.

At the time we all committed to the project, we all saw the great opportunity we had because of the need of a good Technical FortiGate / FortiOS book. At that point, Fortinet had sold more than 400,000 devices but besides the official documentation, there was not any other written reference. We have to say Fortinet Documentation team is quite good, and the quality of what is produced by them is probably one of the highest in the security industry. But such documentation does not incorporate experience, and we wanted to add value to what it was published already there. With this at sight, the discussion to define the Table of Contents was focused on how could we add value on top of the Fortinet official documentation. We didn’t want just to write about the same topics with a different set of words. We truly wanted to add something that someone working with a FortiGate would find valuable as a reference, and something that could give a piece of advice on how to deal with the whole new paradigm that UTM represents in general. UTM allows users to greatly benefit on increased security, enhanced service levels and efficiency, but we believe until this book, there was no text that gave Fortinet the right amount of importance, illustrating that with real-life examples, but above all illustrating UTM is not only for the Small and Medium Business but also for Large Enterprises, Carriers and Service Providers that want to realize the benefits it offers.

This is what we have today here. In every chapter, the author tried to put not only the technical concepts and knowledge that will allow the reader to have a good understanding of the topic at hand, but also tips and tricks, so the reader can benefit of the experience the authors have had through the years of exposure to the technology in different situations, which is usually not covered by the formal Fortinet documentation. We also wanted to add some information on the book about how to handle FortiGate-related projects and how to use this technology to solve issues on some key verticals where Fortinet approach has a clear differentiator over any other technology out there. So, the book you have in your hands is technical in nature, but also gives you some ammo to be better prepared when in the middle of a project related to Fortinet technologies.

Finally, since this book comes after Fortinet sponsored “Unified Threat Management for Dummies”, a free book that can be found on Fortinet’s website, an effort was made to not overlap with the content offered there.