Fortinet Unveils its Security Fabric ensuring pervasive, adaptive cybersecurity

Fortinet unveiled its Security Fabric which it claims is an integrated, collaborative, and adaptive architecture designed to deliver distributed security for global enterprises. It provides protections against threats from IoT and remote devices, through the infrastructure core, and into the cloud.

Ken Xie, founder, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Fortinet, said, “Pervasive digitization continues to redefine business, while technology trends like IoT and cloud computing are blurring the edges of the network today. Unfortunately, many enterprises continue to rely on security strategies developed decades ago that can no longer support the ever-increasing speed of business. Unlike platforms loosely coupled at the management level, the security fabric weaves together highly sophisticated hardware and software, enabling direct communication between solutions for a unified and rapid response to threats. Fortinet is committed to delivering security without compromise. With its Security Fabric, Fortinet is the only vendor to be able to provide its customers with seamless protection across the expanding attack surface, and, the power to take on ever increasing performance requirements of the borderless network – today and into the future"

Fabric Security is Critical to Sustain Business Innovation in the Digital Economy, further adds the company. Today’s digital economy connects more users, devices, applications, and data than ever before to drive business value. Billions of new IP-enabled, non-user IoT devices are transmitting vast amounts of data traversing wired and wireless access points, through both public and private networks, and across traditional and cloud infrastructures. To successfully compete in this new digital economy, organizations need to implement a tightly coordinated security strategy that can see and govern this data across an entire borderless network without compromising agility or performance.

Fortinet’s Security Fabric, as claimed by the company, delivers security without compromise. To address the challenges brought on by the digital economy and subsequent evolving enterprise IT infrastructure, Fortinet’s Security Fabric brings traditionally autonomous systems together into a single architecture, designed with five critical and interdependent attributes – scalability, awareness, security, actionable, and open.

In order to detect, let alone stop threats in today’s borderless networks, a Security Fabric not only needs to be able to dynamically scale to meet volume and performance demands, it needs to scale laterally for seamless, ubiquitous protection. Fortinet’s industry-leading portfolio of security technologies offer solutions that cover every inch of the infrastructure, including wired and wireless networks, end user and IoT devices, access layers, public to hybrid cloud models, software-defined networks, and virtualization. Employing advanced technologies like hardware-accelerating FortiASIC processors and security embedded network appliances, including virtual and cloud instances, ensure that a network’s function, performance, and scalability are not compromised by the solutions securing it.

Fortinet’s scalability across the infrastructure lays the groundwork for the second fundamental attribute of the Security Fabric: awareness. Operating as a single entity, the Fabric delivers complete awareness across devices, users, content, and data flowing into and out of the network, as well as insight into traffic patterns. This reduces complexity and costs while increasing management efficiencies, enabling easier implementation of new capabilities and innovative security strategies like end-to-end segmentation for protection against advanced threats.

Universal visibility into the infrastructure is critical to the security required in today’s evolving threat landscape. Acting as a single-pane-of-glass for Fortinet’s Security Fabric is the world’s most deployed security operating system, FortiOS. Technologies like Fortinet’s Advanced Threat Protection Framework conduct deep inspection of traffic, dynamically generating local threat intelligence and transmitting data to FortiGuard Labs to automatically propagate real-time updates to the entire system. This breadth of intel coupled with sophisticated, scalable, and rapid analytics, provides an actionable security architecture with the capability to rapidly detect and mitigate threats wherever they occur.

Ensuring that enterprise customers can maximize their existing infrastructure and security investments, its Security Fabric is designed to integrate with a vast ecosystem of third-party solution providers. Fortinet works closely with its Global Alliance Partners, as well as the industry, to develop open APIs across the entire fabric, giving enterprises the flexibility to deploy Fortinet solutions alongside existing or new security technologies for integrated protection. Most recently, Fortinet has partnered with Carbon Black to provide enterprise customers with security automation, intelligence, and control through integration with the ATP Framework.

“Rated as the most innovative school in the country, Arizona State University Research Computing is on the cutting edge of tomorrow’s technology development. Security and performance are critical enablers to this innovation. The only manner in which to address all potential vectors is a security solution that acts as a seamless fabric. Leveraging 100Gbps performance and the defensive benefits of Fortinet’s Security Fabric help to enable our continued research and innovation,” commented Jay Etchings, director of research computing, Arizona State University.

“Fortinet’s Security Fabric is a natural fit for Carbon Black’s ‘Unite’ strategy of integrating our products with those of a key partner to bring our joint customers the advantages of best-of-breed security products that work seamlessly together. New files identified by Carbon Black as potentially malicious can now be sent to FortiSandbox for deeper analysis and real-time ratings, providing customers with an additional layer of security to stop advanced threats and targeted attacks," added Tom Barsi, senior vice president of business development, Carbon Black.

“Mobility, the cloud and IoT has raised the complexity of security to new heights. A 2015 ZK Research Security Survey revealed that 43% of respondents admit to turning features off in security appliances to improve performance, indicating that as most point products can no longer keep up with the number of advanced and targeted threats rendering traditional approaches to security ineffective. It is now critical for businesses to adopt a unified security fabric that can provide the necessary layers of security without additional complexity or slowing down the network to adequately defend against today’s evolving threat landscape,” said Zeus Kerravala, principle analyst, ZK Research.

> Fortinet also launched its latest FortiGate 6000E and 2000E series enterprise firewalls powered by its next generation FortiASIC CP9 content processor to deliver unprecedented levels of network security performance across the Fabric.
> New enhancements to the Fortinet Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) framework enable dynamic generation of local threat intelligence and automated response coupled with new FortiGuard services for global threat intelligence protections.
> Delivering on its commitment to an open, integrated Security Fabric, Fortinet announces a new technology alliance with the Carbon Black Security Platform to further bolster for protection against today’s most advanced and persistent threats.