Fortinet today released its cloud-native, next-generation firewall services tailor-made for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment during the cloud giant’s re:Invent event.

The FortiGate Cloud-Native Firewall (CNF) for AWS is managed by Fortinet and taps its FortiOS operating system and FortiGuard artificial intelligence (AI)-powered threat intelligence capabilities for simplified and consistent network security across on-premise and AWS cloud environments, the vendor claims.

“With Fortinet taking over the management of the infrastructure, it allows customers and partners to focus on their core competencies and easily create, deploy, and manage security policies for their AWS environments,” Vincent Hwang, senior director of cloud security at Fortinet, said in response to questions from SDxCentral.

He added the firewall delivers advanced security such as intrusion prevention system (IPS) and antivirus-as-a-service, requiring no maintenance from customers.

Additionally, Fortinet offers a centralized management tool — FortiManager for the cloud-native firewall, as well as its physical and virtual FortiGates products to ensure consistent security policies across hybrid clouds, Hwang touted.

To align with zero-trust principles, “FortiGate CNF will support segmentation using policies that use metadata-based tags. This ensures protection as long as trust boundaries are established using the tags,” he added.

Fortinet optimizes cloud firewall costs

This ability to manage firewalls across hybrid cloud networks, and aggregate security across networks, availability zones, and virtual private clouds (VPCs) in a cloud region helps customers to optimize costs, the vendor claims.

“With FortiGate CNF customers can use just one instance to aggregate traffic inspection in an entire cloud region. Competing solutions require customers to deploy multiple instances in different availability zones, which increases the operational burden for security operations teams,” Hwang said.

Plus, the FortiGate CNF runs on AWS Graviton instances. The Graviton processors are designed to “deliver the best price-performance” for cloud workloads running in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, according to AWS.

“This helps Fortinet optimize cost performance and this enables us to offer a competitive price for customers and partners,” Hwang said.

Cloud firewall competition heats up

As cloud security demand surges, more firewall vendors rolled out cloud-native security products partnering with or supporting major cloud providers.

Earlier this year, Palo Alto Networks partnered with AWS to natively integrate its next-generation firewall into the public cloud. Oracle also introduced its cloud-native, managed firewall service powered by Palo Alto Networks’ VM-series firewall technology.

On the other hand, cloud service providers including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud also offer cloud-native firewalls natively.

Hwang touted that Fortinet’s cloud-native firewalls tightly integrate with all major public cloud providers. “Fortinet FortiGate CNF sets itself apart from other independent software vendor solutions by offering better management flexibility, operational simplicity, and cost efficiency.”