Firewall rental · Operating since 2002
Renting a firewall is a financing decision wearing technical clothes. It is the right answer more often than vendors admit and the wrong one more often than rental pages admit, and which it is for you comes down to how long you need the box and how confident you are about sizing it.
This page sets out both sides of that arithmetic, then covers the part nobody publishes: who the subscriptions belong to, who owns the configuration, and what is on the disk when the appliance goes back. Those three decide whether a rental ends cleanly or becomes an argument.
The decision
Rent or buy, by situation
Not a pitch for renting. Two of these rows point the other way, and one of them is the most common situation in the market.
Scroll the table sideways →
| Situation | Usually | What it looks like | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Known end date | RENT | A project, a site with a lease, an audit window, a migration running in parallel with the old estate. | Buying hardware for a defined period means owning it afterwards. The residual value of a used firewall is close to nothing, so the whole purchase price is the cost of the project. |
| Uncertain growth | RENT | You cannot size confidently because headcount or bandwidth in eighteen months is a guess. | Being wrong is cheap and reversible on a rental and expensive on a purchase. Under-sizing a bought box means buying twice. |
| Proving a design | RENT | You want to run the thing in your own traffic before committing, not in a vendor lab. | A proof of concept on rented hardware answers questions a datasheet cannot, and the cost stops when the answer arrives. |
| Stable estate, long horizon | BUY | Head office, predictable growth, a five-year plan you believe. | Rental is a financing decision. Over a long enough horizon the arithmetic favours ownership — ask for the total over the full term rather than comparing monthly against capital. |
| Capital is the constraint | RENT | The security case is agreed and the capital budget is not. | Opex frequently clears an approval that capex cannot. That is a legitimate reason, and it is worth stating plainly to your own finance team rather than dressing it as a technical one. |
| You want the operation too | EITHER | The appliance is not the problem; nobody has time to run it. | Renting and managing are separate decisions that get conflated. You can buy and have us run it, or rent and run it yourself. See managed firewall services. |
Before you sign
Seven terms that decide how a rental ends
Use these on us as readily as on anyone else. Numbers three and six are where rentals go wrong, and neither appears on a typical rental page — including, until now, this one.
Whose name are the subscriptions in?
FortiGuard and equivalent subscriptions are registered against a serial number and an account. If they sit in the provider’s account, your threat intelligence, your web filtering and your support entitlement all end when the relationship does — and they end on their timetable, not yours. Ask to see the registration.
Who owns the configuration?
You paid for the policy work, the rule base and the VPN topology. Establish in writing that you receive a full configuration export on request and at the end of term. A provider who treats your rule base as their intellectual property has told you what leaving will be like.
What is on the disk when it goes back?
A firewall that has run your traffic holds logs, VPN pre-shared keys, certificates, local accounts and often cached credentials. Agree the sanitisation procedure before the appliance ships back, and agree who witnesses it. This is the single most overlooked term in firewall rental and the one with the clearest data-protection consequence.
What exactly does the monthly figure include?
Hardware, subscriptions, firmware, support and replacement are five separable things. Get each named. A rental quote that is cheaper than another usually differs on which of the five it contains, not on margin.
What is the replacement path to your site?
Not the national average. Advance replacement to a metro and to a plant two hours outside one are different services. Ask about your actual locations.
What happens at the end of the term?
Return, extend, upgrade or buy out — and the price of each, agreed now. End-of-term is when leverage is most asymmetric, which is exactly why it should not be negotiated then.
Can it be terminated early, and at what cost?
Projects end sooner than planned as often as they overrun. A rental whose flexibility disappears under the termination clause is a lease with better marketing.
Straight answers
Things a rental page usually leaves out
Including the one that argues against renting at all.
Renting is more expensive over a long enough term
It is a financing arrangement, and financing costs money. Over three to five years on a stable estate, buying usually wins on total cost. Anyone selling you rental who will not say this is not helping you decide.
We will not quote from a user count alone
“How many users” is the beginning of a sizing conversation and not the end of one. Throughput with inspection enabled, TLS decryption, concurrent sessions and what you intend to switch on later all change the answer. The reasoning is on our firewall sizing page, including the numbers vendors publish and what each actually measures.
Fortinet is what we run day to day
We are a Fortinet MSSP Level Partner and FortiGate is the platform we deploy, tune and operate most. If your environment argues for something else we will tell you, and if what you need is not something we can genuinely support at the level you need it, that is worth finding out in the first call.
A rented firewall is not a managed firewall
Renting puts the appliance on your network. Somebody still has to own the policy, watch the logs and act at three in the morning. If that somebody does not exist yet, rent and manage together or the box becomes an expensive router.
The subscription is the product
The appliance is a box. What makes it a security control is the current threat intelligence, the IPS signatures and the filtering feeds — all subscription. A rental whose subscriptions lapse quietly is worse than no firewall, because it still looks like one.
Working with us
How we handle a rental
We have sold, rented and operated this equipment since 2002, and the reason to rent from someone who also runs firewalls is that sizing and policy are where the money actually goes.
Sized before quoted
Throughput with inspection on, TLS decryption if you intend to use it, and concurrent sessions. A quote produced from a user count alone is a guess with a price attached.
Itemised
Hardware, subscriptions, firmware, support and replacement listed separately, so you can compare our quote against anyone else’s properly.
Subscriptions you can see
You get the registration details. Threat intelligence and filtering entitlement are what make the appliance a security control, and you should be able to verify they are current.
Configuration is yours
Full export on request and at end of term, without a conversation about it. You paid for the policy work.
Return handled deliberately
Sanitisation agreed in writing before the unit ships back, covering logs, keys, certificates and local accounts.
Operated if you want
The same NOC and SOC in New Delhi that run our managed estates, on your rented appliance, if running it yourself is not realistic.
Questions we get asked
Firewall rental, answered
Is renting a firewall cheaper than buying one?
Over a short, defined period, almost always. Over three to five years on a stable estate, usually not — rental is a financing arrangement and financing has a cost. The honest comparison is the total across the full term you actually expect to need it, set against the purchase price plus subscriptions plus support for the same period. Ask us for that total and ask anyone else you are speaking to for theirs.
What is included in the monthly figure?
Hardware, manufacturer subscriptions, firmware maintenance, support and hardware replacement are separate components and a quote should name each one. We will itemise ours. Where a competing quote is materially cheaper, the difference is usually in which components it contains rather than in the margin, so compare the lists before comparing the numbers.
Which firewalls do you rent?
Fortinet FortiGate is the platform we deploy and operate most, and we are a Fortinet MSSP Level Partner. Rental runs through rentafirewall.in. If your environment argues for a different vendor, tell us what you are running and we will be straight about whether we can support it properly at the level you need rather than simply sourcing a box.
How is a rental sized?
The same way a purchase is, which is the point — renting does not make sizing less important, it makes being wrong less expensive. Throughput with inspection enabled rather than the headline number, whether you intend to decrypt TLS, and concurrent sessions rather than bandwidth alone. Our firewall page sets out what each published figure actually measures.
Can we convert a rental into a purchase later?
Ask for the buy-out terms in writing at the start, including whether instalments already paid count toward the price and how the figure is calculated at each point in the term. End-of-term is when the negotiating position is most one-sided, so it is the worst moment to raise it for the first time. We will put ours in the proposal.
What happens to our data when the appliance is returned?
It has to be dealt with deliberately. A firewall that has carried your traffic holds logs, VPN keys, certificates and local accounts, and returning it without a sanitisation step hands all of that to whoever receives it next. Agree the procedure and who witnesses it before the unit ships. We treat this as a contractual item rather than an operational afterthought.
Do you rent for very short periods — an audit or an event?
That is one of the clearest cases for renting, because the alternative is owning hardware whose job ended. Tell us the window and the traffic profile and we will tell you what fits. If the period is short enough that the logistics cost more than the appliance, we will say that too.
Do you rent outside Delhi NCR?
Yes. What varies by location is not whether we can supply the appliance but how quickly a replacement reaches you, so get the replacement commitment stated against your actual sites rather than a national figure. That applies to any provider you ask, not only to us.
Can you manage the firewall as well as rent it?
Yes, and for many organisations that is the reason to talk to us at all — the appliance was never the hard part. Policy ownership, log review and out-of-hours response are, and they run from our own NOC and SOC in New Delhi. See managed firewall services.
Next step
Tell us the period and the traffic
How long you need it for, what the internet circuit is, roughly how many people sit behind it, and whether you intend to inspect encrypted traffic. That is enough for a sized, itemised proposal — and enough for us to tell you if buying would serve you better, which happens often enough to be worth saying here.
Related
Also part of the firewall lifecycle: firewall AMC.