“The Security Fabric is an architectural approach to cybersecurity”-Fortinet

Fortinet talks about its solutions, services and its future roadmap.

What will be the main focus areas for your services?

Fortinet will look to grow its market in critical infrastructure, cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) with our Security Fabric. The Security Fabric is an architectural approach to cybersecurity that provides comprehensive network protection without inhibiting business operations.

The Security Fabric allows customers to deploy leading security solutions across their distributed environments that are designed to communicate with one another in order to detect, prevent, and respond to threats in a coordinated fashion, regardless of where they occur. This broad network of solutions extends from the network perimeter, with next-generation firewalls and endpoint protection, into the cloud, with application security, CASBs, and more, and deep into the core of the network through dynamic network segmentation and powerful data center security technologies. Each device that makes up the Fabric is also regularly updated with the latest threat intelligence from FortiGuardLabs, ensuring an automatic response the moment a threat or threat trend is detected. This comprehensive, intelligent security approach enables the network accessibility organizations need, and at the speeds they require, allowing genuine requests to pass through uninterrupted while stopping those that are suspicious.

The Security Fabric is also highly scalable. This means that as customers’ business and networks grow, their cybersecurity policies and protocols will grow with it. Additionally, the Fabric is designed to evolve alongside emerging networking trends. So as new approaches such as intent-based networking gain traction across enterprises, the Fabric promises to deliver intent-based security to complement and protect those advanced network architectures.

Securing critical infrastructure against cyberattacks is also an increasingly urgent priority as the adoption of smart cities and connected utility services drives the convergence of IT,Operational Technology(OT) and IoT networks. To successfully defend the scope of these converged networks, organizations need an architecture that scales the entire infrastructure for complete visibility, segmentation and integrated protection. Fortinet’s latest OT solutions arm critical infrastructure organizations with a broad security solution that spans their traditional IT environments and also provides the advanced capabilities needed to defend critical OT infrastructure.

How do you see India as a market for Fortinet? What are the verticals in which Fortinet is present?

India is an important market for Fortinet and we have huge presence in almost all major verticals like BFSI, Government, Service Providers, Manufacturing, Hospitality and Healthcare. Service Provider, SMB and Enterprise are all equally important market segments for us in India.

In the last two to three years, various enterprises and the government sector has made significant investments for better security services. Small and medium enterprises that face the same problems as big corporations, are also investing more in comparative solutions that can cover all the aspects of cybersecurity. The service providers in India are investing heavily to provide security for the LTEs or the 4G investment infrastructure. We are also witnessing investments in terms of securing data centers. All thesemarket segments are registering high growth and present opportunities for further growth.

Can you please give us a brief about the channel partner ecosystem?

 Fortinet has over 1400 registered partners in India which includes all the leading Managed Security Service Providers, Large National SIs and ipartners from Tier II & III cities like Gorakhpur, Gaziabad, Jammu, Ajmer and many other small cities. We have direct presence in 14 cities to support these partners and our Major Account Managers work with these partners on over 250 large customer accounts.

We have a mature partner program and an experienced sales team. Fortinet is already delivering value to our partners and their business beyond just what we sell. We want partners to build on the Fortinet Security Fabric to deliver their own value-added services that they can wrap around the Fabric.We’re are also looking at ways to help more partners move from a one-time sale relationship with their customers to one that creates long-term relationships.

 What is the future roadmap for Fortinet?

Encrypted traffic is becoming a growing hole in enterprise defenses as organizations move to the cloud and increasingly adopt web-based applications and services. This is a struggle for IT and security teams as many firewall solutions simply don’t have the ability to inspect encrypted SSL traffic, while solutions that do tend to be prohibitively  expensive. Fortinet continues to push the boundaries of security performance with our new Next-Generation Firewalls that enable our customers to thoroughly inspect encrypted traffic without impacting performance.

We will be launching more network security solutions to support our core firewall offerings and extend our Security Fabric. We will also update our FortiOS security operating system this year, and roll out new firewalls that continue to set record speeds in the industry.

In addition, cloud, SD-WAN and OT security willbe important areas of focus for Fortinet this year.