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Fortinet Expands its Security Fabric to Advance The Third Generation of Cybersecurity

Ken Xie, founder, chairman of the board, and CEO at Fortinet

“The ongoing digital transformation means the edge—not just the cloud—is increasingly important for business. The biggest challenge will be securing the exponential growth of the digital attack surface due to the rapid expansion of edge devices. Because business success is measured in microseconds, organizations cannot afford to trade performance for protection. Instead, security needs to occur at the speed of business everywhere, even at the edge. To achieve this, organizations must adopt a fabric-based approach to security that goes beyond isolated security devices and platforms to cover the whole network at the same time, even when it changes. This requires protection that is broad, integrated and automated.”

News Summary

Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in broad, integratedand automated cybersecurity solutions, today announced the release of the latest version of its flagship operating system, FortiOS 6.2, at its global customer and partner conference—Accelerate 19. This FortiOS 6.2release continues the evolution of theFortinet Security Fabric with over 300 new innovations that span Fortinet’s products and solutions portfolio, enabling organizations to achieve a security-driven network required for theedge and multi-cloud environments created by digital transformation.

Fortinet Solves Important Customer Challenges

Broad visibility of the entire digital attack surface:Fortinet is broadening visibility and simplifying deploymentand management across the expanded Fortinet Security Fabric with deeper integrations between Fortinet solutions and over 70+ Alliance Partners.The FortiGate NGFW, best-of-breed FortiGate Secure SD-WAN solution and large portfolio of cloud-native platforms have all been enhanced with new functionality, including intent-based segmentation. Customers can maximize the new breadth of comprehensive visibility delivered in FortiOS 6.2 through Fortinet’s 360 Protection services bundles that include a wide array of professional services.

Integrated protection and detection of advanced threats: Fortinet continues to lead product innovation through the active support of the latest industry standards, including integrated support of TLS 1.3 to secure internet traffic, new deception-based technologies to address intrusions and trust-based segmentation that operates seamlessly across the extended Fortinet Security Fabric, from core to edge and to cloud. Fortinet’s FortiDeceptor technology provides best-in-class defense and protection security tripwires, triggering automated responses against malware and unauthorized users looking to access and exploit networked resources.

Automated operations, orchestration and response:The Fortinet Security Fabric’s deep integration and advanced automation capabilities help customers reduce overhead by providing single-pane-of-glass visibility and management across all solutions integrated into the Fortinet Security Fabric. Applying automation and machine learning functions toreduce complexity, expand span of control and automate critical functions enable threat response at digital speeds. And continuous, AI-based threat intelligence feeds from FortiGuard Labs increase the speed and accuracy of threat detection and automated response.

News Announced Today in More Detail

The Fortinet Security Fabricdelivers the most comprehensive suite of security offerings in the industry—available in a variety of form factors and running natively across the widest range of platforms. The enhancements of FortiOS 6.2 further expand the industry-leading capabilities of the Fortinet Security Fabric with enhanced end-to-end protection from advanced threats, while significantly reducing the complexity inherent in designing, deploying, managing and updating most security architectures. Highlights include:

Fabric Expansion

  • FortiOS 6.2 provides enhancements to the following Fortinet Security Fabric elements:

  • FortiADC — application delivery controller

  • FortiToken — user and device authentication tool

  • FortiCASB-cloud — cloud access security broker for public clouds

  • FortiDDoS — Distributed Denial of Service protection

  • FortiNAC — network access control

  • VDOM — virtual domain

Secure SD-WAN

  • The Fortinet Security Fabric’s advanced SD-WAN capabilities now include an expanded set of best-of-breed WAN functions and services. These new capabilities allow customers to achieve higher performance for business critical application using cost effective connectivity to the enterprise branch.Benefits include: 

  • WAN link remeditation using Forward Error Correction to handle the volatile WAN connections for unified communication applications

  • On-demand WAN bandwidth measurement

  • Overlay controller to better manage large and complex connectivity issues

  • Aggregate overlay bandwidth sharing between multiple connections to enhance performance and eliminate latency issues

  • High-speed application recognition to accelerate packet steering to ensure that end users receive the best user experience and application performance at all times

Multi-Cloud Security

  • Fortinet’s FortiGate NGFW now integrates with Kubernetes through FortiOS 6.2 Fabric Connectors to deliver new container security capabilities. These capabilities help customers secure any north-south traffic entering or leaving their container clusters by logically defining policies based on labels and meta-data information from containers and cloud resources.

  • FortiMail will now integrate with O365 Exchange online, allowing customers to easily apply the latest FortiGuard threat intelligence to better protect emails flowing through O365 Exchange. The integration does not require any network or mail flow reconfigurations, rather, it directly connects to O365 APIs. This provides organizations with advanced threat protection to ensure their email is secure.

  • FortiGate–VM’s new virtual SPU architecture supports high performance applications in the cloud.FortiGate VM’s new virtual security processor (vSPU) accelerates performance in both private and public clouds, enabling customers to confidently migrate their high-performing applications to the cloud. Leveraging this architecture, FortiGate VM continues to be first to market supporting high performance virtualization technologies, such as AWS C5n Instance types, Intel QAT, Oracle Native Acceleration and more.

Open Ecosystems

  • FortiOS 6.2 enhancesFortinet’s single-pane of glass visibility and management across the growing suite of Fortinet security products, third-party solutions from the Fortinet Fabric-Ready partner community and native third-party connectors. The integration of new security capabilities and automation functions through Fortinet’s open ecosystem in the Fortinet Security Fabric enables:

  • Automated threat assessment and response holistically

  • Compliance assurance through an advanced risk-ratings analysis calibrated to industry standards

Automation and Orchestration

  • FortiOS 6.2 significantly expands the single-pane-of-glass automation, orchestration and response features across the Fortinet Security Fabric with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer, which provide:

  • Single-Pane-of-Glass Orchestration: Provisioning and configuration management is streamlined across the Fortinet Security Fabric. Key enhancements include zero-touch provisioning for FortiGates, FortiSwitches, FortiAPs, secure SD-WAN and Fabric Connectors for better services and cloud orchestration.

  • Automation: Manual, time-consuming processes are automated end-to-end to make operations less complex. This includes IOC history scan for threat hunting and incident timeline /SOC dashboards for incident analysis and triage.

  • Response: Assets and identity data is incorporated for enhanced threat detection and correlation, quick remediation. Integration with Scripts, Webhooks, ServiceNow and many others lead to fast incident remediation as well.

AI-based Security

  • FortiGuard Labs has developed the FortiGuard AI threat detection and analysis system. Its Artificial Neural Network, comprised of over 9 billion interconnected nodes, not only detects and categorizes threats at unprecedented speeds, but also generates a highly accurate threat intelligence feed that is actively consumed by Fortinet solutions.

  • FortiGuard Labs’ AI-based threat detection system underpins new advanced breach detection technologies and has been integrated into FortiGate NGFW, FortiWeb, FortiMail, FortiClient, FortiSandboxand FortiSIEM in order to accelerate threat detection and response.

  • Automated orchestration utilizes intelligence inputs from a wide range of sources, including FortiGuard Labs’ AI-enhanced threat intelligence, third parties feeds, and local intelligence provided through the Fortinet Security Fabric. It also enforces actions in response to AI-based UEBA detection in FortiSIEM.

Nisha