Case Study: Water Treatment Company achieves 15% cost savings and rapid firewall provisioning with Fortinet FortiFlex licensing

FortiFlex Licensing Enables Efficient Firewall Provisioning in Fluid Security Environment

A global water treatment company with retail, manufacturing, logistics and office operations across the Americas and Europe faced a fast-changing environment driven by heavy M&A activity (60 acquisitions in a year) and a migration from many on‑prem data centers to Microsoft Azure. Because business units chose their own applications and the company couldn’t accurately forecast firewall throughput, IT risked overprovisioning cloud firewalls, dealing with slow third‑party licensing cycles, and losing visibility into shadow IT.

The company adopted FortiFlex usage‑based licensing to provision FortiGate VMs and FortiManager (supported by FortiGuard UTP and Secure SD‑WAN) so it could scale security up or down on demand. The change delivered a 15% reduction in FortiGate VM costs through right‑sizing, cut new firewall deployment time to about 30 minutes versus more than a week, uncovered shadow deployments, streamlined M&A integration into the corporate cloud, and enabled cost‑effective spin‑up and tear‑down of test environments.