Why FortiSense exists

For many organisations, endpoint security looks like this:

• Built-in antivirus is enabled
• Alerts are rare or vague
• There’s little context on why an alert happened (or why nothing alerted)
• Incidents are discovered late, often after damage is done

This isn’t negligence. It’s the default.

Tools like Microsoft Defender are widely deployed and do a solid job at blocking many known threats, but they’re not designed to give small teams clear, early signals of suspicious behaviour across their environment.

Traditional antivirus focuses on known bad files and signatures. That’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

Many real incidents don’t start with a clearly malicious file. They begin with:

• Unusual process chains
• Scripts or tools running from unexpected locations
• Sudden spikes in CPU, memory, or outbound traffic
• Legitimate binaries used in risky ways

Antivirus may not flag these immediately, or at all, because nothing is overtly “malicious” yet.

FortiSense watches for these patterns and surfaces them as explainable alerts for example, a suspicious parent process launching a scripting host, or an unsigned executable running from an unusual path alongside abnormal outbound traffic.

Enterprise EDR platforms are powerful, but they come with trade-offs that don’t suit most small teams:

• High cost per endpoint
• Constant alert volume
• Complex tuning and maintenance
• Dedicated security expertise required

For organisations without a SOC, EDR often creates more operational burden than clarity.

FortiSense is not trying to replace enterprise EDR. It’s designed to give small teams useful visibility without overwhelming them.

FortiSense sits between traditional antivirus and full EDR.

When FortiSense raises an alert, it shows why.

Instead of a generic “threat detected”, alerts include context such as:

• What process ran
• What launched it
• Where it executed from
• What resources it consumed
• What behaviour triggered concern

This makes it easier to triage quickly, decide whether to act, suppress noise safely, and explain decisions internally.

Explainability is what allows small teams to stay in control without specialist tooling.

Many security tools assume always-on connectivity and desktop-only use. Real environments aren’t like that.

FortiSense is designed to work when:

• Endpoints are offline or intermittently connected
• Devices are servers running headless
• Performance overhead must stay minimal

The agent runs as a background service, caches critical intelligence locally, and continues protecting endpoints even if connectivity is lost, uploading telemetry when it resumes.

The agent runs as a background service, caches critical intelligence locally, and continues protecting endpoints even when connectivity drops then uploads telemetry when the connection returns.

FortiSense is a good fit if you:

• Rely on antivirus today but want more visibility
• Run a mix of desktops and servers
• Don’t have a dedicated security team
• Want early warning signals, not forensic overload

If you need full incident forensics, compliance reporting, or SOC workflows, FortiSense may be best used alongside enterprise EDR not instead of it.

Personal plans are great for individuals. Business is for shared environments and shared responsibility.

• Multi-user roles (Admin / Analyst / Viewer)
• Centralised policies and baseline enforcement
• Organisation-wide fleet views (risk, trends)
• Longer retention for incident review
• Business-ready billing (VAT invoices)