Security

Fortinet unifies Zero Trust, Endpoint, and Network Security within the Fortinet Security Fabric

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Fortinet acknowledges that the industry as a whole is moving in the same direction, but believes that they have a substantial first mover advantage.

Today security vendor Fortinet is announcing that they have integrated zero trust, endpoint, and network security solutions within their Fortinet Security Fabric. It provides the ability to offer all of the capabilities of these services unified to specific users regardless of their location, based on their environment and risk profile. It is thus well suited for the Work From Anywhere [WFA] market, as well as other use cases.

“Over 50% of workplaces will be using WFA for some time to come,” said John Maddison, Fortinet’s EVP of Products and CMO. “Many have been using short-term fixes like VPNs to handle this, but they need a long-term solution. What we have done here is take endpoint security, Zero Trust Access, and the security technology that has been put inside the Linksys home router, and brought them all together so that they can talk to each other.” Fortinet and Linksys have been long-term strategic partners, and Fortinet recently acquired a majority share in Linksys.

Maddison stressed that this unity allows for much greater contextual context around security.

“if you have information around a user, you can determine if the device belongs to them, and if they are sitting in the place that they usually are,” he said. “You can apply a powerful contextual engine.”

Fortinet cited recent data from Gartner indicating that the change in work routines will increase the total available remote worker market to 60% of all employees, up from 52% in 2020, and that 75% of hybrid or remote knowledge workers say their expectations for working flexibly have increased. They also say that organizations now need to put a platform in place to respond to this. Yet Maddison said the way that they industry has approached this has been inadequate.

“Customers who have used integrated solutions in the industry have had to deal s with the fact that these solutions are very complex, and poor at sharing threat intelligence, opening APIs, and building automation,” he said. “They are supposedly integrated, but in practical terms, they aren’t really integrated at all. It’s still an issue of many different vendors being used for different things. In contrast, the user doesn’t even see our integration.”

Maddison acknowledged that the industry as a whole is moving in this direction, He noted that Crowdstrike’s acquisition on Monday of SaaS-based SecureCircle is explicitly designed to extend Zero Trust to data on the endpoint. Kaspersky’s acquisition of Brain4Net at the end of last week was designed to extend their SASE and XDR strategies in a unified solution. And these are just the most recent moves towards a unified platform. Maddison, however, says that Fortinet has a significant first mover advantage.

“Other companies have also recognized that customers want this,” he stated. “It’s hard when you acquire technology and bolt stuff together. We feel we have a huge 10-year head start on our platform because of our mesh. We’ve been doing it for 10 years, and we empower the channel to come alongside us to come along on that journey.”

For mobile workers, Fortinet offers a fully integrated set of Endpoint Security solutions [EPP, EDR, and XDR (FortiEDR, FortiXDR)], Zero Trust Access solutions: [ZTNA (FortiClient, FortiOS, FortiGate)], Identity solutions [FortiAuthenticator, and FortiToken], and Network Security solutions, with FortiSASE Remote.

For the Work From Home market, Fortinet provides an integrated combination of the same Endpoint Security solutions as for mobile [EPP, EDR, XDR (FortiEDR, FortiXDR), for Zero Trust [FortiClient, FortiOS, FortiGate] and Identity [FortiAuthenticator, FortiToken]. The network security solution for this market, however, is Linksys HomeWRK for Business | Secured by Fortinet.

For conventional office environments, the Endpoint Security, Zero Trust and Identity solutions are the same, but the integrated Network Security solution is their Next-generation Firewall, with FortiGate and FortiGate-VM.

So while WFA was a key cause in bringing the new offering portfolio about, the solution set is broader than WFA.

“This is a broad strategy, not specific, and we have 50 products on our platform,” Maddison said. “WFA is a use case you apply it to, with digital transformation and application journey being others.”

Maddison said that partners can make more money from this kind of platform strategy than by selling point products.

“It gives them the ability to take a solution to partners and not just a point product,” he said. “This allows them to apply their expertise and architectural capabilities, with broad solutions across multiple products.”