Fortinet Security Solutions

On today’s post we are going to discuss about Fortinet solutions and its advantages on the security in a data center. Fortinet is one of the most recognized and advanced brands to provide this on the current market with their special focus on network security and management through their monitoring tools.
In general, we can distinguish on Fortinet a different set of software and hardware solutions related to this areas:

• Network security
• Cloud security
• Zero trust access
• Security as-a-service

On the following, we are going to describe some of the most important products and services that Fortinet is offering and its main features.
First of all, one of the most important hardware elements we can see is FortiGate, a firewall solution that provides a set of features related to security and networking capabilities to the data centers.
There are different versions and the latest includes the following items.

• Firewall features, to monitor and filter the incoming and outgoing network traffic based on an organization's previously established security policies. At its most basic, creates an essential barrier that sits between the private internal network and the public Internet.
• Additional features
  
  • Application control
  • Reputation’s service
  • Intrusion Prevention System
• NSS Labs Certification that provides a comprehensive and impartial test, in real-world situations, that identifies the key requirements for SD-WAN and the effectiveness of each solution. The SD-WAN capabilities that were assessed by NSS Labs include Zero-Touch provisioning, WAN Performance, Application-Aware Traffic Steering, Dynamic Path Selection with SLA Measurements and High Availability with WAN Impairments. Fortinet delivered best user experience with High Availability in extreme WAN impairment conditions.
• SD-WAN, The Fortinet Secure SDWAN (software-defined wide-area network) solution enables enterprises to transform and secure all WAN edges. Leveraging the Security-driven Networking approach that uses one operating system and one centralized management console, enterprises realize superior user experience, enhanced security posture effectiveness with converged networking and security, and achieve operational continuity and efficiency.

As a result, the FortiGate allows to block the bast majority of exploits used by criminals.
On other hand, the SDN Security Framework. A solution oriented to provide the following:

• Virtual appliances/services. With that the virtual firewalls can be deployed at the virtual switching layer for visibility into east-west traffic.
• Platform orchestration & automation. Administrative changes can be automated by coordinating security management with hypervisors, SDN controllers and other infrastructure platforms.
• Single pane-of-glass management. Unified management of policy, events and analytics across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure eliminates security and compliance gaps.

Basically, provides support for the network virtualization, multitenant support and virtual domain support for network segmentation and security function deployment and API’s for cloud automation and orchestration.
Fortinet NGFX, Next-Generation Firewalls filter network traffic to protect an organization from internal and external threats. NGFWs have deeper content inspection capabilities. These capabilities provide the following features:

• Packet filtering
• IPsec
• Network monitoring
• IP mapping capabilities

• The ability to identify attacks, malware, and other threats, and enable NGFWs to block these threats.

This provides the ability to identify attacks, malware, and other threats, and enable NGFWs to block these threats. They also offer:

• SSL inspection
• Application Control
• Intrusion prevention
• Advanced visibility across the entire attack surface

It’s interesting to consider the NGFX on our data centers to improve the security and adapt to the nowadays attacks.
On other hand, the NFV. Network Function Virtualization which enable for the deployment of networks with complicated requirements through the virtualization of a huge part of the functions needed.
And finally, the SDN Framework for the data center security. The Software Defined Network is an architecture, and its main idea is data and control traffic separating which has amended the network flexibility, programmability, and manageability. The SDN-based network contains a physical or conceptual centralized controller with a global view of the network.
This last two, can improve the management operations of our data centers and reduce times and errors on the network control and monitoring.

That’s all for today’s post, we hope you learned a bit more about Fortinet solutions. We will provide more information on the next posts.

Matias Balzamo & Eduard Lecha