Faster Security for 5G Networks, SASE for Service Providers, & Cloud-Native Protection: Recent Fortinet Innovations

Faster Security for 5G Networks, SASE for Service Providers, & Cloud-Native Protection: Recent Fortinet Innovations

Posted by HSSL Technologies on Sep 14th 2022

With nearly 1,300 patents and hundreds more pending—more than many of our competitors combined—Fortinet is deeply committed to innovation. But it’s not just the volume of our creativity that sets us apart. It’s the cadence at which those innovations are launched and the vast number of solutions they encompass.

Earlier this year, in just the span of two weeks, Fortinet introduced three major new offerings designed to support security teams as they all work toward a common goal: staying ahead of their adversaries. What’s even more remarkable is that Fortinet delivered these solutions across such a broad spectrum of technologies, including security, networking, and the cloud. It’s all part of Fortinet’s commitment to providing organizations with a broad, integrated, and automated solution strategy designed to span and adapt to today’s highly dynamic hybrid networks.

Below is a summary of three of these previously announced offerings and a look at their vital role in a modern security program.
Security: Fortinet Introduces the World’s Fastest Compact Firewall

Fortinet is no stranger to NGFW innovation. The sweeping functionality and advanced capabilities of the FortiGate portfolio of Next-Generation Firewalls are why it’s the most deployed solution in the world. And remarkably, Fortinet is still the only vendor to have met the challenge of increasing needs for performance by developing a custom security and networking processor, the NP7. It – along with our Content Processor (CP9) and System-on-a-Chip (SoC4) – doesn’t just provide faster solutions than anything produced by our competitors at the same price point. It was designed to enable organizations to build the networks they need to compete in today’s digital marketplace without sacrificing performance (or breaking the bank) to accommodate lackluster security devices.

And on August 3rd, we moved the needle even further when we announced the launch of our new FortiGate 4800F series of hyperscale firewalls. These new solutions set new standards for security, scale, performance, and innovation. Powered by 16 of Fortinet’s seventh-generation network processors (NP7), the FortiGate 4800F offers the highest performance figures of any compact firewall. It provides Security Compute Ratings that deliver up to 34x better performance than competitor solutions, including the ability to support an average of 19x more connections per second. This increased capacity is especially beneficial for hyperscale customers and 5G mobile network operators (MNOs). "[The] 2.4Tbit/sec of firewall throughput really benefits enterprise customers who need to host applications on-premises that will never move to the cloud for compliance, control, and performance reasons,” Nirav Shah, VP of products at Fortinet, told The Register.

Regarding firewalls, higher performance in a smaller footprint means security becomes an enabler for 5G adoption. Hyper-performance not only allows mobile providers to deliver new use cases for enterprises, critical industries, and infrastructure. It also ensures that enterprise customers – like online retailers, research facilities, financial institutions, and cloud providers — can amplify the performance, scalability, and security they need to meet their growing business requirements without additional overhead. Additionally, organizations can reduce costs associated with data center space, cooling, and power.

The bottom line: The FortiGate 4800F series of hyperscale firewalls allows organizations to concurrently run more applications while reducing their physical footprint to secure their expanding networks more effectively.
Networking & Security Convergence: Fortinet and Comcast Partner to Offer SASE Services

Another new reality organizations are starting to wrestle with is that today’s networks are nothing like the ones most security solutions were designed to defend. Modern networks are more than just perimeterless. They are expansive, continually evolving, and constantly in flux. Both networks and the workforce that uses them are hybrids, which means they can no longer be protected with a bolt-on security solution. Instead, security and networking must be converged into a single, seamless solution.

Fortinet is at the cutting edge of this new reality, building security and networking tools designed to address and adapt to the most complex network environments, regardless of how many clouds, branches, or remote workers need to be managed. Our unified mesh architecture, the Fortinet Security Fabric, combines security, cloud, networking, and endpoint solutions into a single system to provide complete visibility and centralized control even across complex, multi-tenant environments.

It’s why the world’s largest service providers are choosing Fortinet. The latest example is Comcast. On August 1st (just two days before the FortiGate 4800F announcement), we announced a partnership with Comcast Business to deliver new SASE and SSE services through Comcast Business Secure Gateways and leveraging Fortinet’s security-driven networking technology.
"Our unified mesh architecture, the Fortinet Security Fabric, combines security, cloud, networking, and endpoint solutions into a single system to provide complete visibility and centralized control even across complex, multi-tenant environments."

As organizations embrace remote work, IT leaders must provide strong security for their users while delivering a consistent user experience. For organizations beginning to embrace a Zero Trust approach to security in response to WFA, using SASE and SSE solutions sets the foundation for implementing Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). “What Fortinet and Comcast are doing together is [enforcing ZTNA],” Shah said to SDX Central. “So whether deployed in a cloud-delivered fashion or you want to deploy it on-prem, universal ZTNA is there.”

These innovations help enterprises improve their security posture while enhancing user experience regardless of where they wish to work. And when organizations can deploy and manage SASE or SSE technologies through a unified solution like FortiOS, they reduce inefficiencies and streamline their security operations.
Cloud: Fortinet Introduces FortiCNP for Cloud Risk Management

There is no question that the cloud has utterly transformed how the world works. The challenge is that not only does each cloud include numerous solutions and services that need to be managed and secured, but that nearly every company on the planet is running multiple clouds. It makes seeing, monitoring, and optimizing the network almost impossible.

So, just a week before the Comcast announcement, on July 26th, we introduced FortiCNP, a new cloud-native protection offering that works across Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS cloud platforms. And in this first release, FortiCNP also provides a deeper level of cloud-native integrations for AWS services, with plans to expand FortiCNP cloud-native integrations to Google Cloud and Azure over the coming quarters.

FortiCNP’s patented Resource Risk Insights (RRI)TM technology produces context-rich, actionable insights that show which risks have the highest potential impact on cloud workload security, pointing teams to the alerts that matter most. Additionally, FortiCNP serves as a single-pane-of-glass for security teams, as it integrates with numerous security tools from Fortinet, cloud service companies like AWS, and other technology vendors.

The solution is particularly valuable to MSSPs, says Vince Hwang, senior director of cloud security at Fortinet. “If I have a Security Operations Center (SOC) team at the MSSP that’s managing on behalf of a set of customers, and every customer has their own choice of deployments or their own needs, rather than having to configure each one individually, I now only have this one platform approach, this one focused point of view that I need to learn and work in. Everything becomes much more efficient,” Hwang told Channel Futures.

As organizations pursue digital transformation and choose to move their operations to the cloud, security teams are increasingly inundated with alerts. FortiCNP aims to cut through the noise by surfacing the risks that need immediate attention, helping security analysts prioritize remediation efforts and work more efficiently.

Get a free trial of FortiCNP at AWS Marketplace.
Modern Networks Require a Converged Security Platform

While these three announcements cover solutions that address three distinct areas and challenges of the modern enterprise, they’re united by Fortinet’s commitment to building a broad, integrated and automated platform – what we call the Fortinet Security Fabric. As the only single-vendor platform to consolidate critical technologies and converge critical environments – including security, networking, endpoints, and the cloud – into a single platform that also shares threat intelligence, correlates data, and automatically responds to threats as a single, coordinated system, the Fortinet Security Fabric is essential to reducing complexity and increasing security effectiveness across today’s expanding networks. With the introduction of these three new offerings, organizations have even more solutions to help them achieve those goals. They are further testament to Fortinet’s commitment to building technologies designed for the way organizations do business today and to enable their plans for tomorrow.