Fortinet enhances Secure Networking with Unified Management and Analytics

Fortinet announced new innovations enabling unified management and analytics across its secure networking portfolio. CIOs today must contend with highly complex, disparate environments, and Fortinet delivers game-changing visibility and enforcement across all secure networking elements, including Hybrid Mesh Firewall, Single-Vendor SASE, Universal ZTNA, Secure SD-WAN, and Secure WLAN/LAN.

Vishak Raman, Vice President of Sales, India, SAARC and Southeast Asia at Fortinet said, “In the next decade, secure networking will overtake networking and emerge as the predominant market to support the immense processing power requirements of secure connectivity. Fortinet was founded over 20 years ago with the goal of converging networking and security into secure networking solutions. Today we’re deepening unified management and analytics across our secure networking portfolio to give CIOs unprecedented levels of visibility and enforcement across their entire environment—whether on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid of both.”

Secure Networking Expands with New Hybrid Mesh Firewall

Today’s networks are complex hybrid environments that extend across many edges, which is leading most organizations to shift to a secure networking approach that converges security and networking. An emerging component of secure networking is Hybrid Mesh Firewalls. According to Gartner, “Hybrid Mesh Firewall platforms enable security policy controls to be defined and enforced between workloads, and between users and workloads connected on any network in on-premises first organizations.” Gartner anticipates “by 2026, more than 60 percent of organizations will have more than one type of firewall deployment, which will prompt adoption of hybrid mesh firewalls.”

Because of Fortinet’s unique converged approach, we've already been delivering on the concept of Hybrid Mesh Firewalls to customers for years and are taking things one step further with unified management and analytics across not just Hybrid Mesh Firewalls but our entire secure networking portfolio.

Cut Through Complexity with Unified Management and Analytics Across the Entire Hybrid Network

‪FortiManager is Fortinet’s centralized management solution that covers the enterprise network across FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall deployments (both on-premises and in the cloud), as well as Secure SD-WAN, Secure WLAN/LAN, and Universal ZTNA. With today’s news, FortiManager now integrates with FortiSASE, Fortinet’s Single-Vendor SASE solution, making Fortinet the only vendor delivering consistent security, management, and analytics across the entire hybrid network.

Additionally, Fortinet is now introducing new updates across its secure networking portfolio and FortiOS 7.4, including:

Hybrid Mesh Firewall for Data Center and Cloud

• FortiGate 7080F is a new series of next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) that eliminates point products, reduces complexity, and delivers higher performance through purpose-built ASIC technology and AI/ML-powered advanced security. It delivers a Security Compute Rating of 5x faster NGFW firewall performance, 2x faster IPSec VPN throughput, and 2x better threat protection, all while being 73% more energy efficient per Gbps of firewall throughput compared to the industry standard.

• FortiFlex is a new points-based consumption program with support for Hybrid Mesh Firewall deployments and a variety of products, such as virtual machines, FortiGate appliances, and SaaS-based services, among others.

Secure SD-WAN for Branch Offices

• Fortinet Secure SD-WAN enables consistent security and superior user experience for business-critical applications, whether in the cloud, the data center, or on-premises, and supports a seamless transition to single-vendor SASE. We believe it’s because of these features that Fortinet was named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SD-WAN for the third year in a row.3 New enhancements unveiled today include automation in overlay orchestration to accelerate site deployments and a redesign of the monitoring map view to provide global WAN status for each site.

Single-Vendor SASE for Remote Users and Branch Offices

• Fortinet’s Single-Vendor SASE solution, FortiSASE, converges cloud-delivered security and networking to simplify operations across hybrid networks. As part of today’s news, FortiSASE now integrates with FortiManager, allowing unified policy management for Secure SD-WAN and SASE along with unmatched visibility across on-premises and remote users.

Universal ZTNA for Remote Users and Campus Locations

• Fortinet Universal ZTNA provides the industry’s most flexible zero-trust application access control no matter where the user or application is located, and new enhancements now deliver user-based risk scoring as part of our continuous checks for ongoing application access.

WLAN/LAN for Branch Offices and Campus Locations

• FortiAP, our family of industry-leading, secure WLAN Access Points, can now integrate with Fortinet’s Single-Vendor SASE solution, marking the industry’s first AP integration with SASE. This enables secure micro-branches where an AP is deployed to send traffic to a FortiSASE solution and ensure comprehensive security of all devices at the site.