Fortinet Secure Networking Vision & Overview

Good morning everyone. I'm Suma Manam, director of Product Marketing at Fortinet. Today I'm gonna talk to you about Fortinets Secure Networking Vision and overview.

A little primer on who Fortinet is. Many of you may know this. Fortinet was founded 25 years ago in Sunnyvale, California.

We've been the driving force in the evolution of cybersecurity, and more importantly, convergence of security and networking. Our mission is to fortify cybersecurity and secure, and we do that by securing people, devices and data everywhere. We have over 800 K customers that trust our solutions, which span over 60 enterprise products and services, one of the most deployed, most patented and most validated.

We have over 33 analyst reports that validate our solutions. And we do everything from networking, lan, uh, lan, networking, security, endpoint, cloud, everything in between. But one of the unique things about Fortinet is that we're vertically integrated.

What do we mean by that? We not just make our own security and networking products, but we also own our own operating system. We also design our own asics for our products.

And this makes us vertically integrated because it lets us take control of our supply chain. And over the years we've continued to invest in our land portfolio, either by growing organically or via acquisitions. You all know that we acquired Meru a few years ago, but if you've been working with Fortinet, you also know that we don't sell Meru wireless technology anymore.

But we continue to use the IP and the engineers from meru to improve our wireless solutions at this moment. And along those lines, uh, our recent acquisition of Linksys is to enter the consumer market. And Alex will be speaking more about this in his session.

And our most recent acquisition is of Everest Networks. This is for us to get into providing wifi for large public venues like stadiums. So with that, let's get into the presentation.

The enterprise land landscape has definitely changed, but you can attribute all the trends and anchor it on a single one, which is the skills gap challenge. Think about it, there's a proliferation of IOT devices, but security teams don't really have enough people to go out there and secure every device and ensure it's patched. They don't have those many people.

And then we talk about convergence. Why are people opting for convergence in ai? They just don't have the teams available to them.

Um, so in order to scale these teams, they prefer an integrated land van, data center, SD wan, all of these things. And this brings us to, okay, this enables them to scale their teams. But what does that really mean when you scale teams, you are looking for operational efficiency and how do you achieve that?

By converging security and networking and these IT and security teams are really looking to consolidate the vendors versus having point vendors for everything. So on that topic of convergence of security and networking, let's see what the secure networking lineage looks like. For Fortinet, we really started with the FortiGate Next Generation firewall and that runs our 40 guard AI powered services.

And the core of our FortiGate is our 40 os. It's the op homegrown operating system from Fortinet. What we did with our networking products is we extended this 40 OS and we built out our switches and aps.

So a protocol called 40 link facilitated this. Now what this means is our switches and aps are essentially extensions of our next generation firewall. We've extended the security into the lan.

This makes us, you know, do a few things which are competitors cannot do or probably cannot do it as easily. We've made it smarter because of our ability to integrate with a layer seven next generation firewall. We have something called 40 link n.

It's a knack light version. What it does is it works with us, which is an aps. When devices come onto our network, the 14 link NAC is able to segment these devices and apply the right layer seven security policy.

We also have a full fledged nac, which is our 14 nac. The difference between the two is the 14 NAC works with third party devices, which is just as, but we go one step further and make 40 link NAC and 40 NAC valuable by offering a 40 guard service called virtual patching. What this essentially is the next generation firewall scans the devices on the network and if it comes across a CVE or vulnerability, it pushes a policy to the switches in aps so that a patch is created and the vulnerability cannot be exploited.

So we are not only secure, but we're smarter about the whole secure security and networking convergence. And to top all of this off, we have a single pane of glass to manage all of this that could be either locally from the FortiGate or at scale. This is our 40 manager, which is powered by ai.

Our 40 manager is integrated with our AI network ops product, which is the 40 AI ops, 40 AI ops works across our SD wan, our switching, our wireless and our 5G gateways. So it's looking at all these components, providing trend analysis, actionable insights back to our 40 manager, which then makes appropriate changes in the network. And James and uh, Alex will be speaking more about this in the next session.

And lastly, we have the 40 monitor. That's our digital experience monitoring tool. It really gives you a hop by hop visibility all the way from the device to the Application.

So when we are speaking about management, we are very conscious that, you know, of course, uh, if you have your land devices connected to our 40 gate, you can manage it locally from the 40 gate or 40 manager. But we do understand there are customers who choose to use standalone APS and switches. So we offer cloud management for the VIA 40 Edge Cloud and for the SS e um, thin edge devices, we offer 40 SS e cloud security and management.

And both of these will be touched upon by Alex in the last session. So it's really giving you complete management s versatility with a single firmware across all of them. Let's talk about lifecycle management because I think this is one of the key value propositions of what we offer our customers Because of our unique convergence of, you know, next generation firewall with land, because they're extensions of our firewall, we allow deployment to take place by uploading a single file on the firewall, which then brings up the SD wan, which the firewall is integrated with the switching, the wireless and the 5G.

So this is essentially your day one zero touch deployment, making operations really easy for the IT and security teams. Day two is the day-to-day management. You know, you're looking for issues, you're troubleshooting what's happening in your wired network, wireless van.

You are looking at all these different pieces and understanding why the network is getting impacted. But this involves a lot of manual tasks and the time to resolution is usually higher. So what we do is we are relying on our ai now ai and we have a good story around this.

This is not just a marketing buzzword. Next session, James and Alex are gonna cover it. It's not just our 40 AI ops but also our broader 40 ai.

And there's a component called AI Assist that James will be touching upon. What this does is it reduces the time to resolution because it's looking across the entire network and it's providing recommendations, it's looking at the baseline metrics, providing recommendations, and essentially optimizing customers deployments. So that's our end-to-end lifecycle management given our broad product portfolio and Sum will be talking about it in his session.

We really support multiple use cases, whether it's campus or our SD branch because of our sdwan dominance. But in case you did not know, we are also leaders in the OT segment because of our ruggedized care. And we have the micro branch, which essentially is our hardware functioning as sass E thin edge devices.

So a user connecting to our hardware gets directed to a SASS e pop and gets all the cloud security. And the last one, like I mentioned, is our latest acquisition, which is us offering large public menu wifi. And that's again, something sum month will go into greater detail into.

I'll wrap this up with, we understand it's a clouded and mature market, but we wanna highlight why customers are opting for Fortinet Secure Land. Really it's about the stronger security. We've told you about how our networking is an extension of our security, our next generation firewall.

And this lets us be smarter. We are able to ingest all this data and provide automation with this intelligence. So that means secure onboarding of iot devices, providing security services like virtual patching.

All of this makes it not just secure but smarter as well. And at the end, I'll wrap this up with the easier to purchase, deploy, secure, and manage purchase. We do not charge any additional licenses for SD WAN that comes integrated with the next generation firewall.

Neither do we charge additional licenses for managing your switches aps or your 5G. So there's no extraneous licenses and customers are aware of this upfront. CapEx cost easier to deploy.

I already told you about the zero touch deployment piece with a single file, easier to secure. We've been speaking about, you know, the stronger security we offer and easier to manage with a single pane of glass management. And with that I'll hand it over to James.

Thank you so much.