FortiGate 50G Firewall

The 50G is the model we put in front of a new office of around twenty people. It is small enough to sit on a shelf in a comms cabinet, quiet enough to live in the corner of a room, and it does the whole job in one box: routing, VPN, web filtering and intrusion prevention, with no separate device to licence and patch.

A first office rarely needs to think beyond one internet line. The 50G has four gigabit copper ports for the local network and a 10-gigabit SFP+ port for the fibre uplink that most new Hong Kong offices are now handed — enough for the firewall itself, the run to the switch, and a spare for the second circuit you will probably add later.

The honest limit is headcount. Past about forty users, or once a large share of the office is on VPN every morning, the 50G becomes the thing holding the network back, and we would move you up to the 70G or 90G instead. Choosing the 50G now is not a dead end — Fortinet’s configuration carries straight over — but we would rather tell you the ceiling up front than sell you a box you outgrow in a year.

As with every FortiGate we quote, the hardware is a one-off cost and the security subscriptions are annual. We list both so you can see the three-year cost, not just the price of the box.