I earned my first Fortinet certification in 2005 (FCA1016) and I’ve been working with the platform ever since.
After more than 2 decades, I’ve touched a lot of FortiGates, FortiManagers, and FortiAnalyzers. I’ve built them, migrated them, upgraded them, repaired them, standardized them, inherited them, untangled them, and occasionally stared at them wondering what on earth the last engineer was thinking.
That experience matters.
Fortinet environments rarely fail because someone doesn’t know where the policy screen is. The difficult problems live in the gaps: between routing and security policy, between FortiGate and FortiManager, between what the configuration says and what the network is actually doing, or between a design that works for five firewalls and one that must remain manageable at fifty or five hundred.
Those are the problems I like.
I work comfortably across the Fortinet stack, but FortiGate, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer are where I’ve spent most of my career. I can troubleshoot an individual firewall, but I also understand the operational systems surrounding it: policy packages, ADOM design, object management, revision control, centralized logging, administrative domains, RBAC, change workflows, upgrades, standardization, and the realities of managing firewalls at scale.
I’m particularly useful when an environment has become difficult to explain.
Maybe you’ve inherited years of configuration drift. Maybe FortiManager was installed but never truly adopted. Maybe every firewall is technically working, but making a change feels dangerous. Maybe your MSP has grown faster than its operational practices. Or maybe you’re preparing for a migration, acquisition, audit, or major redesign and want someone who can look at the environment without needing six months to understand it.
That’s where experience starts paying dividends.
After 21 years, I won’t pretend I’ve seen everything. Fortinet is too large, networking is too complicated, and anyone who claims otherwise should make you nervous.
What I have learned is how to approach unfamiliar problems, recognize patterns quickly, separate symptoms from causes, and know when something that looks simple probably isn’t.
I don’t just want to make your firewall work.
I want to leave you with a Fortinet environment that is easier to understand, easier to operate, easier to troubleshoot, and less dependent on tribal knowledge.
If Fortinet is important to your network, it should probably be important to the person helping you manage it.
For me, it has been for more than two decades.