Fortinet: Align Your Customers’ Business Needs with Security Functionality

In an interview with DQ Channels, Rajesh Maurya, Regional Vice President, India & SAARC at Fortinet shares the importance of aligning business needs with security functionality.

Do you see a shift in the way C-level is looking at cybersecurity today?

Today’s enterprises are dealing with constant change affecting different parts of their business. And far too often, the various solutions to these new realities do not align. This is especially true of business goals and cybersecurity policy. Traditionally, as customers have manoeuvred simultaneously to address rapidly changing business and consumer demands along with security threats, a compromise was made at the expense of cybersecurity.

However, as new threats evolve with enormous consequences for the bottom line, board members and C-level executives are shifting their focus to recognize the critical role cybersecurity must play in business, but without impacting either profitability and accessibility.

How can System Integrators help customers address their business needs?

Partners need to address several competing business trends with a single solution. Speed, profitability, and business growth often appear to be at odds with compliance and security. However, for your customers to be successful, each of these trends must be addressed without hindering another.

1. Speed & Profitability: Profit is the main objective of each business unit, and today it is increasingly achieved through speed, either in terms of responding to customer needs, managing inventory and production, or delivering critical
services. This is why trends such as digital transformation and agile development exist. The consumers your customers serve to expect instant accessibility and information.

2. Business Growth: If the profitability opportunity is met, the next challenge that your customers’ will face will be growth. In today’s digital business environment, this means that the infrastructure they have in place must be both scalable and elastic. Otherwise, growth and speed will be hindered, ultimately impacting both profitability and viability. To achieve this, infrastructures are being reworked to handle the increased traffic every couple of months, often through a combination of new technologies such as IoT, cloud-based infrastructure or services, and expanded data centre resources and throughput.

3. Security: With new, sophisticated cyber attacks targeting businesses of all verticals, especially targeting the constantly expanding attack surface, the nature of the security infrastructure cannot be ignored. A successful data breach can cause severe reputational damage; ransomware and DDoS attacks can knock organizations offline; and sensitive customer data can be stolen, resulting in severe liabilities. Any of these will impact the bottom line. As a result, your customers need security solutions that enable growth and profitability, while securing their network
and data. They just may not know where to look.

4. Compliance: As your customers leverage new tools, such as connected devices and applications, they are collecting more consumer data than ever. As a result, a number of regulating bodies have begun imposing strict new standards
for data storage and protection. To avoid the fines and penalties that accompany non-compliance, customers need security controls that ensure they meet these standards.

How can partners ensure that security is no longer a hindrance to network accessibility?

For security and compliance, the easiest solution would be to decrease network accessibility. However, this would be at direct odds with their business goals and needs. Network accessibility is integral to digital transformation efforts and
employee efficiency. Similarly, security has often been seen by business units as a hindrance to innovation.

Part of the reason is that IT teams typically add one-off isolated point solutions to the network to address the ‘threat of the day.’ However, the lack of communication between these devices can result in decreased network accessibility and visibility, as well as security efficiency, ultimately compromising performance. At the same time, however, C-level executives increasingly acknowledge the importance of mitigating data breaches and remaining compliant.

As a result, a recent study found that 43 per cent of cybersecurity professionals agree that aligning the goals of the IT teams with those of business units is the most beneficial investment organizations can make. With Fortinet, it is now possible for customers to align these four conflicting goals using an integrated Security Fabric approach to achieve both security and velocity without compromising either one.

If partners need to Align Business and customers Cybersecurity Policy without conflicting with each other how should they go about it?

The Fortinet 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 also 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 centre security technologies.

Each device that makes up the Fabric is also regularly updated with the latest threat intelligence from FortiGuard labs, ensuring an automatic response the moment a threat or threat trend is detected. This comprehensive, intelligent security approach enables the network accessibility organizations to 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 customers’ organizations, the Fabric promises to deliver intent-based security to complement and protect those advanced network architectures.

Finally, what kind of technologies will help customers stay protected in 2018?

Organizations need to be able to provide a seamless experience to their users while meeting compliance standards and securing their network from data breaches. While many of today’s traditional security solutions do not provide the flexibility and performance to meet these conflicting goals, the Fortinet Security Fabric offers intelligent and comprehensive security that allows for unprecedented growth, speed, profitability, and compliance.