Colombia. Fortinet unveiled its new Software-Defined Network Security (SDNS) infrastructure. It is the first in the industry designed to provide advanced threat protection, thanks to the integration of security, with an agile and modern environment in the data center.
This new infrastructure offers a clear vision and the steps to follow when securing the data center. It has the most extensive platform to integrate infrastructures with technology partners such as HP, Ixia, PLUMgrid, Pluribus Networks, Extreme Networks and NTT. SDN security redefines advanced cybersecurity, in a world where data centers are changing due to virtualization, cloud computing, and today, software-defined networking.
"Today's information security infrastructure is somewhat rigid and static to support the changing needs of digital business and provide the necessary protection," said Neil MacDonald, vice president and analyst at Gartner Research. "Security vendors are shifting hardware management policies toward software-based management, for greater flexibility, no matter the location."
Fortinet's new SDN security infrastructure adds the company's innovations at all levels of the network:
Data plane: It is the encapsulation of security engines from fixed hardware boxes to logical instances, which can be distributed and embedded deep into virtualized switch fabrics and abstract network flows.
Control plane: It is the orchestration and automation of security policies with the provisioning of flexible workloads to eliminate security cracks and regulations, in dynamic environments of great agility.
Management Plan: It is a single "transparent layer" for security policies and events across physical and virtual devices, public and private clouds, and across infrastructure to ensure a consistent, regulatory-compliant security posture.
"There likely is no single SDN platform that service provider and enterprise customers can standardize with," said John Maddison, vice president of marketing at Fortinet. "For them we are developing an ecosystem that supports the different SDN platforms, through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The key is to provide scalable security modules that can be requested at the time of instrumentation.
Fortinet's efforts in the software-defined environment began more than 5 years ago with the first FortiGate-VM virtualized appliances, which secure increasingly virtualized and consolidated data centers. These efforts have expanded, along with the continued transformation of data centers, including several accomplishments such as: new Fortinet security appliances to support Microsoft Azure; membership in the HP AllianceOne program for optimized, pre-integrated security for the HP SDN portfolio; integration with Cisco application-centric infrastructure (ACI), and network security efforts for VMware vSphere and SDDC customers.
Similarly, as part of its overall data center strategy, Fortinet has worked closely with a large number of partners to integrate security within their key infrastructure platforms. These platforms include SDN controllers, orchestration frameworks, hypervisors, cloud management, security management, and analytics. Fortinet currently works with more than two dozen technology vendors to ensure protection against cyber threats through advanced SDN security.
