Network security company Fortinet announced today that it’s extending the capabilities of its Fortinet Security Fabric to include security for software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
Fortinet’s Security Fabric is an umbrella term for all of its security products, which are embedded into the fabric, said John Maddison, SVP of products and solutions at Fortinet. The company has created a baseline of code for all of its security products — end points, access points, firewalls, and cloud security — so they can be easily integrated into the fabric.
Fortinet’s new SD-WAN security is no different. Fortinet has applied the capabilities of its security fabric to SD-WAN including firewalls and hypervisors. Fortinet provides load balancing and monitoring metrics so users can select the most efficient route for mission-critical traffic and will reroute traffic accordingly.
To use its new SD-WAN security, Fortinet customers have the option to pick SD-WAN services from one of its partners — VeloCloud, Silver Peak, or Versa Networks, Maddison said.
Fortinet is also announcing visibility for both on and off-network usage of SaaS applications using a cloud access security broker (CASB). FortiCASB will be offered in the fabric to protect data and files running in SaaS services and will be available by the end of second quarter 2017.
“[FortiCASB] also gives visibility into cloud applications, which is hard to do because they sit outside the infrastructure,” Maddison said. Fortinet built an application program interface (API) to link the monitoring capability directly to SaaS application performance.
Prior to this announcement, Fortinet’s fabric focused on securing networks that run either in the cloud or on-premises. Now the fabric is able to provide security for public cloud, private cloud, on-premises, SD-WAN, and SaaS. And all of these capabilities are managed across a single console and single pane of glass view. It also shows how all of these security products in the fabric are communicating and interacting with each other.
“To defend an entire attack surface, you need to be able to share information and mitigation information very quickly,” Maddison said. “Users are able to send information across all of these elements with a single management console to manage policy and analytics — whether it be in the network or application.”
Last year, Fortinet rolled out partner APIs to help other companies easily integrate elements of its security fabric into their networks, alongside their own security products. Initial partners included Brocade, Carbon Black, Qualys, Tufin, VeriSign, and WhiteHat.
