Fortinet

Fortinet’s FortiGate line runs on purpose-built “SPU” security processors rather than off-the-shelf CPUs, which the company uses to justify strong price-performance claims, particularly for SSL inspection at scale. That hardware advantage underpins its dominance in unit shipment volume, especially among SMB, mid-market, and service-provider customers running SD-WAN and branch firewall deployments.

The Security Fabric ties FortiGate to dozens of adjacent Fortinet products (endpoint, SIEM, SD-WAN, NAC, secure access) under one management plane, and the company has extended into SASE via FortiSASE. It remains the volume leader in the NGFW market by units sold, largely on the strength of appliance economics rather than a cloud-native architecture shift.

Fortinet’s efficacy record has been repeatedly tested by attackers: CVE-2024-21762, a critical SSL-VPN remote-code-execution flaw in FortiOS, was exploited in the wild before patching, and later that year CVE-2024-47575 in FortiManager (dubbed “FortiJump”) was also exploited by threat actors, prompting a CISA advisory. This is not an isolated incident — FortiOS SSL-VPN vulnerabilities have been a recurring target for ransomware affiliates since at least 2022.