Fortinet Security Fabric Lays the Foundation for Intent-Based Network Security

Fortinet announced enhanced offerings that provide the building blocks for tomorrow’s self-provisioning, self-operating and self-correcting, Intent-Based Network Security. The latest innovations in the Security Fabric include the release of FortiOS 5.6, the world’s most advanced security operating system, along with Fortinet’s new Security Operations Solution.

Ken Xie, founder, chairman of the board and chief executive officer at Fortinet said, “The demands of today’s digital economy are driving increasingly complex networks that require highly skilled and rare talent to design, deploy, operate, and most importantly secure. Today’s point products and platform security solutions simply aren’t capable of providing the solution breadth, processing performance, or advanced automation necessary to address these demands. It’s clear that traditional approaches to security are quickly becoming unsustainable. The Fortinet Security Fabric delivers the broad, powerful, and automated security solutions needed to solve today’s challenges while laying the foundation for the self-sufficient, Intent-Based Network Security that will be critical to protect tomorrow’s enterprises.

The Fortinet Security Fabric Lays the Groundwork for Tomorrow’s Intent-Based Network Security

According to a recent report by Joe Skorupa and Andrew Lerner, “Intent-based networking adoption is being driven by digital business transformation's requirements to increase network agility while increasing reliability/availability. The increasing complexity of networks, combined with critical skills shortages in design/deploy/operate tasks, are increasing pressure on infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to find a better way to map the requirements of the business to infrastructure behavior in a timely, consistent and verifiable way.”

As a complement to intent-based networking technologies, Fortinet’s vision is to deliver Intent-Based Network Security that will enable the Fortinet Security Fabric to automatically translate business requirements into synchronized network security actions without human intervention. This will free enterprises to design more advanced security architectures while greatly simplifying complex deployments and reducing operational burdens; ultimately delivering largely self-sufficient technology infrastructures capable of continuously maintaining an optimal security posture across the entire attack surface.

The major enhancements to Fortinet’s flagship operating system combined with its Security Operations Solution deliver unprecedented vision and automation capabilities across an enterprise’s entire infrastructure, from the endpoints to the cloud. These combined capabilities also represent continued innovation of the Fortinet Security Fabric and provide a framework for tomorrow’s advanced Intent-Based Network Security.

FortiOS Expands Security Fabric Capabilities Across Devices and Applications

The FortiOS release 5.6 combines numerous technological innovations to deliver universal and centralized capabilities far beyond those of traditional security platforms or point solutions available.

• FortiOS 5.6 provides total IT awareness with instant visibility into every security element through a single pane of glass and provides open APIs (Application Program Interface) to integrate with Fabric Ready partner solutions.

• Expanded vision into Fortinet’s Wireless Access Points, Switches and Sandboxes results in enhanced management and truly centralized control over networking components and advanced threat protections.

• A revamped User Interface (UI) was designed to rapidly turn IT awareness into security action. New network topology visualizations and enhanced interactive views for auditing, logging, and reporting enable IT teams to easily modify their networks in real-time.

• FortiOS 5.6 provides proactive security recommendations to help improve network effectiveness and compliance.

• As a foundational technology of the Fortinet Security Fabric, FortiOS 5.6 scales from IoT to the Cloud and across physical, virtual, and hybrid environments to segment and protect the entire attack surface of the largest, globally distributed enterprises.

Security Operations Solutions Unifies Network and Security Operations Delivering End-to-End Security Fabric Visibility

The Fortinet Security Operations Solution unifies network and security operations within the Fortinet Security Fabric to arm IT and security leaders with insights that maximize their technology infrastructure. Security Operations consists of FortiSIEM, FortiAnalyzer, and FortiManager solutions that can be deployed standalone or in conjunction to meet the unique needs of individual organizations.

• FortiSIEM is an all-in-one NOC and SOC solution that offers automatic security, visibility, performance, and availability monitoring in real-time. FortiSIEM is capable of compiling and correlating intelligence from the Fortinet Security Fabric plus data from thousands of additional IT assets including switches and servers, to desktops and IoT devices, all through a single pane of glass.

• FortiSIEM also supports external threat intelligence feeds and event logs to extend the advanced analytics and compliance capabilities of the Fortinet Security Fabric to every physical and virtual asset across an enterprises entire technology footprint.

Gartner

“Intent-based networking adoption is being driven by digital business transformation's requirements to increase network agility while increasing reliability/availability. The increasing complexity of networks, combined with critical skills shortages in design/deploy/operate tasks, are increasing pressure on infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to find a better way to map the requirements of the business to infrastructure behavior in a timely, consistent and verifiable way.”

“Unlike any other approach, intent-based networking algorithmically proves the "correctness" of the configuration before deployment and continuously monitors the operation of the network. If it detects a condition that no longer satisfies the intent of the design, it alerts operations and, if possible, takes corrective action to re-establish the correctness.”

“Intent-based networking solutions promise to dramatically improve network design and operation. In today's enterprise networks, we are dependent on network architects' ability to understand the totality of the environment, and their ability to generate a design that meets the needs of the applications they support. However, as computing environments became larger, more complex and more dynamic, it became impossible for the architect to achieve more than an "informed best guess" of the required configuration — to verify or prove the correctness of the design/configuration — the intent. This leads to unplanned outages and sometimes long, difficult troubleshooting activities.”

Availability

FortiOS Release 5.6 will be available to download in the first quarter of 2017. Fortinet’s Security Operations Solution is available now. Please contact your authorized Fortinet distributor for additional details.