Short answer
Hosted VDOM gives you an isolated virtual firewall instance on FirstNet's shared FortiGate platform. Sophos Shared Firewall gives each customer a dedicated Sophos Firewall Virtual machine on FirstNet's hypervisor. Both are hosted and managed by FirstNet; the right choice depends on your preferred platform and feature needs.
In detail
Key differences:
- Tenancy: a VDOM is a logical partition of a shared FortiGate, while Sophos Shared Firewall separates customers by giving each its own firewall VM, with no multi-VDOM sharing
- Protection levels: Hosted VDOM comes as Lite (basic firewalling and VPN) or Enterprise (adds IPS, antivirus, web filtering, application control, SSL inspection and SD-WAN); Sophos comes with Standard or Xstream Protection
- Management: Fortinet estates can be run through FortiManager with FortiAnalyzer logging, while Sophos is managed through Sophos Central
- Ecosystem: Sophos Synchronized Security can isolate compromised devices automatically if you use Sophos endpoints
In both cases FirstNet configures, monitors, updates and supports the firewall, and support is available as 8x5 or 24x7.
A short discovery session covering your sites, users, links and VPN needs confirms the best fit.
Source: FirstNet Hosted Firewall & Network Security service page →
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