We were recently working on an environment that had Replify Accelerator and Fortinet’s FortiClient Enterprise Management Server (EMS) deployed. Fortinet is a well-known provider of cyber security solutions. Its enterprise solutions will protect networks from a variety of threats, including malware, ransomware, and phishing attacks. However, using the right acceleration can boost the user experience.
First, let’s understand what we mean when we talk about improving the user experience with acceleration. Almost all cloud-hosted services will suffer when the connection between the user and the cloud network is slow, unstable, and prone to interruptions. Outdated infrastructure, insufficient bandwidth or heavy network congestion can be contributing factors. Further, the infrastructure from the end-user all the way to the cloud hosted service has to be of a good quality to get the best user experience.
For an end-user, these network issues mean it’s slower to access the web page they are trying to access. The file-share they are trying to download something from could be sluggish. The application they are using as part of their day-to-day work may be frustratingly unresponsive.
We’ve worked with several ZTNA products recently and have found that they generally send traffic off to a server in the cloud for processing (and proxying). With a poor quality network, this can have a direct, and adverse affect on user experience.
However, with FortiClient, we were impressed that much of this processing was performed directly by the client device itself. This means it didn’t need to re-route traffic via a server in the cloud. However if the network is slow, the user could still have a poor experience.
Improving the Performance of Fortinet
The Replify Accelerator can assist here, boosting the user experience. Our Accelerator Client can be installed on the same end-user device as a Fortinet client.
The two products co-exist well together and the combination of both can bring fantastic results. For example, on a 250Mbit down/20Mbit up connection, the combination of products in certain circumstances more than doubled the download speed and increased the upload speed twenty-fold:
This level of improvement could make a noticeable difference to user experience and potentially productivity.
Any Fortinet users who want to check this out for themselves are welcome to download a free trial of Replify Accelerator to test this on their own environment.