Hi everyone! 👋 I'm Linda, and I'm relatively new here (and to this whole world of enterprise security, honestly!). I've been lurking for a bit, learning so much from all of your discussions.
I'm part of a completely cloud-native company—we use AWS, Google Workspace, Notion, Figma, Slack, you name it. Everything is SaaS. Our team is fully remote and scattered across different countries. We've outgrown our basic VPN solution, and my project manager hat is on as we look for a secure access service edge (SASE) solution that fits our reality.
FortiSASE keeps coming up in our research, but almost every case study or review I find seems to be about companies with a mix of on-prem servers and cloud apps. Our world is 100% cloud apps and zero physical office infrastructure to connect back to.
So my big question is: **Is anyone here using FortiSASE in a similar, purely cloud-native environment?**
I'd love to hear about your real-world experience:
* How was the setup when you don't have a FortiGate appliance as a starting point?
* Does it feel like it's truly designed for a cloud-first workforce, or does it sometimes feel like you're adapting a more traditional model?
* Specifically, how does it handle securing access to things like our cloud-hosted development environments or our myriad SaaS tools? I'm curious about the user experience for the team—is the client lightweight and unobtrusive?
* And maybe a silly worry, but does the pricing model make sense when you're not also buying their hardware?
I'm slightly overwhelmed by all the options and acronyms, so honest guidance from this community would be a lifesaver. What are the genuine pros and cons for a setup like ours?
Thanks!
Exactly my situation! We're also fully cloud, no on-prem anything. We went with FortiSASE about six months ago.
The setup without a FortiGate was actually straightforward. You start from their cloud portal, deploying what they call a "virtual connector." It felt a bit odd configuring a virtual thing to connect to other virtual things, but it worked. The biggest hurdle for us was the user onboarding - getting everyone to install the agent and understand it replaced the VPN.
I'd love to know if you've looked at the identity integration part? We tied it into Google Workspace, and that's where it started feeling truly cloud-first. The security policies apply based on Google groups, which is perfect for us.
Do you have a dedicated IT person handling this, or are you, like me, a project manager trying to figure it out? That changes the experience a lot, I think.