This might surprise you coming from a Fortinet MSSP partner who sells and manages FortiGates every single day. But I’ve told clients not to buy Fortinet. More than once. And I’ll do it again. Here’s when. When Your Team Has Deep Palo Alto Experience I’ve seen this play out too many times: a CISO arrives
I’ll say it plainly: the best firewall in the world, configured perfectly, with the latest firmware and the tightest rules, is exactly as effective as a speed bump if nobody is watching it. A speed bump slows a car down. It doesn’t check if the driver has stolen the car. It doesn’t tell you where
Last year, our team audited 5,732 firewalls. That’s not a round number I picked for effect—that’s the actual count from our deployment and audit logs. FortiGates, Palo Altos, Sophos, Cisco ASAs, a few niche vendors. Enterprise data centres, bank branches, hospital campuses, manufacturing plants, multi-site retail chains. Every single one had at least one misconfiguration.
January 25, 2003. A Saturday. I was at my desk—because in cybersecurity, Saturdays are just Thursdays with better coffee. I’d been in the industry for about a decade at that point, running network operations. We’d seen worms before. Code Red. Nimda. The usual chaos. Nothing—and I mean nothing—prepared us for SQL Slammer. At 05:30 UTC,
