Let's be honest here, the annual "IoT Security" slide in the Fortinet roadmap presentation has become something of a running joke in our procurement circles. We've been hearing about comprehensive IoT device profiling and zero-trust network access for IoT within the SASE framework for what feels like three fiscal years now. Every time, it's positioned as a cornerstone for the "FortiSASE vision," and every time, the actual deliverable seems to get pushed to the right, replaced by another incremental update to SD-WAN or yet another dashboard widget.
My team was specifically sold on FortiSASE with the explicit promise that the IoT visibility and microsegmentation features were "on the immediate horizon." That was 18 months ago. We have a growing fleet of building management systems, medical devices, and manufacturing sensors that remain in a glorified VLAN because the SASE service, as it stands today, treats them as generic IP addresses. The so-called "IoT device support" currently amounts to:
* Basic MAC address filtering, which is an operational nightmare at scale.
* Referencing the FortiGate NAC functionality, which requires on-prem hardware, completely contradicting the cloud-native SASE promise.
* Vague documentation that tells you to create manual firewall policies based on IP ranges, which is precisely the legacy complexity SASE is supposed to eliminate.
This isn't just a missing feature; it's a fundamental gap in the security model they're selling. They're asking us to buy into a zero-trust, identity-centric perimeter while forcing us to leave a massive class of non-user devices in a trust-by-default zone. The sales engineering response has devolved from "next quarter" to "it's on the roadmap" to "have you considered using FortiNAC as an add-on?"
So I'm putting it to the community: has anyone seen tangible, production-ready progress on this front that isn't just a PowerPoint animation? Has anyone successfully negotiated contractual commitments or penalties around this roadmap item? Or are we all collectively waiting for a feature that is perpetually six months away, while the real strategy is to upsell us on another Fortinet appliance to fill the holes in their cloud service?
Trust but verify.