Buy the 5yr warranty extension. Yes you can delay updates/make them manual. If I were you and weren’t ready to give up the fortinet I’d double NAT it for a while, I think you’ll find the benefit of using the complete ecosystem will convince you to give up the fortinet even if there are a few features that fortinet do better.

You can buy a firewall model that has the required controller built in requiring cloud connection or 2nd to that I’d setup a VM using the http://glennr.nl/ scripts as the controller. The scripts are reliable and capable.

I used to run 3rd party, like Sonicwall, firewalls with Unifi wifi for a few years but recent improvements to their approach has made me switch to the whole eco system now and I prefer it.

I’ve used them for years, I don’t use the cloud features just as stand alone. I’ve treated them very poorly in high temp and dirty environments and found them to be extremely reliable.

Hosted MSP360 is set and forget. Wasabi is great but for archive iDrive s3 is noticably cheaper.

If you want data sovereignty a Synology NAS running Active Backup for M365 is really good for a free/included app.

VMware esxi 7, win10 sandbox. Debian hosts for docker. I also run some a couple of i7 Mac mini’s. I try to host on a balance of cheap, power efficient devices that I have spares of in case they blow up because I hate dealing with hardware compatibility issues. Since I decided this and shelved spares I haven’t had any failure’s.