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Fortinet’s ASIC acceleration also makes it kill SSL-bound-nasty stuff too.
The SSL/TLS tide has risen across Indian enterprises—banks, manufacturing groups, IT services. Employees are grabbing cloud apps and SaaS and VPNs and that cloud of encryption over web traffic gets a little thicker. TLS 1.3 implementation is permanently increasing, and legacy cipher suites remain for the time when there are still legacy devices chugging along behind the edge. In reality, this masculine handshake requires security devices to decrypt, inspect, and re-encrypt being present on the scene without being a performance bottleneck. And then there’s the user experience: even a few hundred milliseconds of additional latency comes through in productivity and service levels.
That’s exactly where hardware offload is a gating factor. Fortinet’s FortiASIC methodology is to coordinate crypto, session mgmt, and policy checks within the data path. The output is that here in our Indian deployments, we maintain SSL throughput that remains well close to line rate on many mid-range and high-end FortiGate platforms—what’s more, as long as you’re mixing in TLS 1.2 as well as TLS 1.3 handshakes, SNI lookups, cert pinning checks, and vulnerability scanning. You are still paying for threat prevention features, of course, but the effect is direct and evenly applied. (This is in contrast to software-only inspection in certain Palo Alto configurations which gets variation out-of-control as you grow and you pay further penalties as you add URL filtering, sandboxing, and malware analysis modules, but I digress.)
Palo Alto Networks has a good architecture – strong firewall, good spread of threat prevention landings zones, and a good, differentiated story for cloud and identity integration. But the performance curve that you watching is highly dependent of model and feature. In PA devices with below-mentioned specs SSL Decryption with TP can this throttle the overall throughput figure throughly under Heavy TLS loads that you will primarily see in the UI (latency hikes during Site -to Site bursts or remote user surges). You can maintain those low latencies but only if you pay to buy the right SKUs that can keep up with the decryption policy checks and content inspection without becoming a bottleneck. The lesson is clear: you have to size for your mixed traffic; encryption methods, cipher suites, OCSP checks, certificate lifetimes all contribute.
In NOC/SOC dependent Indian environments, we also keep an eye on the extent at which the platform offered by all these vendors support scalable certificate management with centralized policy replication and logging during SSL led alerts. If your SOC depends on quick attribution of an incident, then the ability to correlate TLS handshake anomalies to firewall events is a game changer. If you are close to the edge you may see a realistic 30-60% drop in raw throughput when full TLS inspection is enabled in some of the Palo Alto SKUs with the Threat Prevention feature turned on. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature of feature set and hardware envelope.
And now the meat: Fortinet’s FortiASIC accelerates all the cryptography stuff – decrypt, re-encrypt, etc. – and session management inline with firewall policy. It’s a architectural decision that has real world impact: you’re not just offloading one operation, you’re offloading the entire TLS state, re-encrypting it, and passing that to secure inspection engines without starving the control plane. In a typical Indian business with moderate SSL usage that includes corporate VPNs, SaaS access, and web apps, the FortiGate platform can deliver high SSL inspection throughput with less than 50 microsecond per handshake latency (for latest models and firmware). That means you can go the whole nine yards on Threat Prevention, IPS, antivirus and sandboxing and keep SSL latency decent. And yes it mitigates patch cadence: historically, Fortinet hardware and paired firmware updates have consistently gotten regular small shots in the arm of performance every time security updates fly out the door.
From a management point of view, Fortinet’s security fabric approach is better integrated with NOC/SOC monitoring tools. And central logging, certificate management, and policy enforcement can be enforced at scale at the campus, data center, and cloud edges. For firewalls, servers, and routers in a zero-trust model, that hardware offload level is directly correlated with less CPU cycles consumed on hosts and more accurate threat telemetry in the SOC.
‘It greatly simplified cost and gave us better visibility across our traffic,’ said the head of IT Infrastructure for the company, a large Indian manufacturing company with many factories and a central data center, larger Sripathi, who swapped out aging SSL-inspecting gear for FortiGate boxes with FortiASIC. In reality, the team had 95% of its traffic encrypted, and they required both low-latency access to production line data and engineering crew access via SSH. Post deployment, SSL inspection remained close to line rate on all core sites, and the NOC registered lower TLS related bottlenecks during shift handovers and remote support windows. The result: better firewall hardening, cleaner handling of credentials for VPN users, and fewer escalations related to latency caused by encryption.
In yet another example, a global IT services company deployed PA-series devices at regional hubs for its multinational customers to provide a unified threat prevention, SSL decryption, and cloud-based reputation services. Due to this heavy TLS workload and intensely large user base, policy tuning meant iterating cipher preferences, re-checking certificate lifetimes, and calibrating URL filtering to prevent wide-spread false positives. The result was tangible; improved gathered visibility around credential/screen shots theft attempts, overall malicious scrip calls while recognizing the optimized throughput gap with Threat Prevention enabled mid-range during busy hours. When the team added SSL offload with Fortinet at the edge, the composite approach yielded smoother user experiences and fewer jumps for SOC alerts—without releasing zero-trust control.
In SSL/TLS-dominated environments, Fortinet’s ASIC acceleration delivers a practical, measurable advantage. The closer you get to line rate and the lower your latencies and more predictable throughput when handling the process of decrypting and inspecting traffic at scale. Palo Alto is still a beast in enterprise threat prevention and cloud integrations etc but you really need to size the hardware right and do some tuning in the planning. The correct response is not a particular vendor; it’s a blended, workload-aware design that incrementally aligns with your managed NOC/SOC posture, patch cadence, and firewall hardening aspirations.
If you’re considering SSL inspection for Indian campuses, evaluate your traffic mix, your encryption cipher demands, and your certificate management process similarly. Give preference to devices that can offload crypto and policy checks in hardware, not only the software. And make sure to test under real-world conditions — TLS 1.3 sessions, forward secrecy, OCSP stapling, and certificate renewals — before you pull the trigger. In the real world, a hybrid edge with Fortinet’s ASIC offload at its heart behind Palo Alto’s cut-through threat prevention can provide good protection with acceptable performance.
Real world use case: How does your actual traffic compare against your map of SSL inspection? Collect baseline of encrypted sessions per app, per site, and per region; measure latency, user detriment, incident response time with & without hardware offload. Make sure your patching cadence matches the device for its firmware and security updates, as crypto and cert handling mutate from each CVE and vulnerability ID flies into your wild. Enforce your decryption policy with strict TLS decryption scopes, explicit cipher suites, and certificate pinning for mission-critical applications, and ensure legitimate access for vendors and remote work. And invest in managed NOC/SOC posture that can: correlate your TLS events to the firewall alerts you were already seeing, detect efforts to steal your credentials, and be capable of zero-trust access policing without indexing the network to be a tangled mess. The aim is predictable security, not bewildering trade-offs for Indian businesses today.
