When Kurt Koening took the job as IT manager at Gold's Gym International Inc. last June, the first thing he decided to do was pump up the fitness company's security. Koening says he needed a way to connect three corporate offices in California, Virginia, and Texas. At the same time, he wanted to strengthen the gym chain's defenses against intrusions and viruses.

After researching standalone VPN, firewall, antivirus, content-filtering, and intrusion-detection systems, Koening realized it would be too expensive and too difficult to manage so many applications. So he turned to Fortinet Inc.'s FortiGate 100 security appliance, which is priced at $1,995 and offers the features he needed.

"For the first time, we were able to set up an intranet for all three corporate offices," says Koening, who also added antivirus software from Trend Micro Inc. to protect Gold's Gym's employee desktop systems from viruses. "What it cost me to have the three FortiGates shipped and installed was cheaper than just the professional services required to install the standalone firewall," he says. "It provides all of the monitoring I need and is easy to manage."