SINGAPOE, February 1, 2005 - Fortinet - the pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions -today announced that the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Singapore has chosen the FortiGate-1000 antivirus firewall platform to secure its network against viruses, worms, Trojans and other content attacks.

The institution was originally located at the National University of Singapore (NUS) campus, and was protected by the university's firewalls and network security infrastructure. Since moving to the new building located at Biopolis, the institution initiated its own network security strategy. Their network security requirements included the protection of research data housed on its network, the need to provide secure remote access to researchers and external parties, and protection against content threats such as viruses, worms, Trojans and intrusions, especially to their mail and web servers.

Johns Hopkins Hospital had evaluated several competitors before selecting Fortinet. The products that were evaluated included point solutions utilizing the "best-of-breed" approach, and other integrated multi-function security products. The criteria for evaluation included simple and cost-effective licensing, , real-time performance, and localized support.

"Fortinet was the only vendor who could meet all our requirements," said Mr Seow Kok Heng, manager of Infocomm services at Johns Hopkins Hospital. "We were impressed with the fact that thesecurity functions, such as anti-virus, intrusion detection and protection, and firewall features are integrated into a single hardware platform that offers the highest performance at an attractive price." "Fortinet also offered the required Virtual Private Networking (VPN) features without the typical licensing costs found with other products. On top of that, our deployment was extremely quick and easy." The Johns Hopkins Hospital successfully deployed the FortiGate-1000 in the second quarter of this year, for its approximately 100 staff, students and researchers. There are plans to expand this deployment into a High Availability (HA) configuration in the future.

"The Johns Hopkins Hospital is a premier institution with a strong reputation for research, and their endorsement is extremely significant.," said Jens Andreassen, Fortinet's Vice President of International Sales., "Fortinet's FortiGate antivirus firewall are highly attractive to research institutions and universities because they uniquely offer complete content protection to safeguard critical data and networks, are cost-effective and easy to deploy and use, and provide the highest level of performance available."

FortiGate Antivirus Firewalls are the industry's only ASIC-based integrated security platforms which detect and eliminate the most damaging, content-based threats from email and Web traffic such as viruses, worms, intrusions, inappropriate Web content and more in real time - without degrading network performance. In addition to providing application level protection, the FortiGate systems deliver a full range of network-level services - firewall, VPN, intrusion detection and traffic shaping - delivering a complete network protection services in dedicated, easily managed platforms.

For more information on Fortinet's FortiGate Antivirus Firewalls and other Fortinet products, please visit: http://www.fortinet.com/products/