Fortinet
Choosing a FortiGate model: 40F, 60F, 90G or 100F?
The model number goes up and so does the price. But which one does your office actually need?
A situation we meet regularly when auditing appliances: the subscription lapsed more than a year ago, the business has no idea, and believes it is protected.
The appliance keeps working. The internet does not go down, VPN stays up, rules continue to apply.
What stops is updating. Antivirus, intrusion prevention and web filtering keep running on the last data set they received. So there is protection, but it is old.
The dashboard still shows antivirus as enabled. Traffic is still scanned — against the threats of the day the subscription ended, not today's.
Because there is no symptom.
When a disk fills up you get a warning. When the internet drops the phone rings. When a licence expires, nothing happens at all. Users carry on working and nobody calls.
This makes licence expiry the security gap businesses live with longest without knowing. The average time to discovery is the next audit.
When a new malware family appears, the vendor publishes signatures within hours. If your subscription has lapsed, that signature never reaches your appliance.
The same applies to web filtering: newly registered malicious sites are not categorised or blocked.
The size of the risk depends on how long it has been expired. One month is not critical; one year is serious.
The management interface has a licence status page showing the expiry date of each service separately — antivirus, IPS and web filtering can expire on different dates.
The support contract (hardware replacement rights) is a separate thing from the security subscription and expires on its own schedule. Check both.
The appliance can also raise a warning as expiry approaches; in most deployments this arrives switched off. Have it enabled.
For clients under our support we track these dates and raise renewal before services stop updating.
Ask us about fortinet licensing and support, or request a free assessment directly.
The model number goes up and so does the price. But which one does your office actually need?
The appliance is a one-off purchase. The subscription is not — and what happens when it lapses surprises people.
If you are not inspecting encrypted traffic, you are inspecting almost nothing. Here is what it takes to do it properly.