In response to the escalating bandwidth requirements of the modern campus amid the return-to-office (RTO) trend, Fortinet introduced its new FortiSwitch 600 and 2000 campus switches, integrating with the vendor’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered security and networking services.

“The hybrid workforce remains strong, but as we are seeing more and more workers are coming back to the campus when you look at the large organization, the bandwidth requirement for the large campus is also going high,” Nirav Shah, VP of products and solutions at Fortinet.

To address the demand, Fortinet added a new multigigabit secure campus access switch — FortiSwitch 600 series to its portfolio, boasting up to 5GE access and 25GE uplinks for better network performance and next-generation wireless access points (APs) support.

The FortiSwitch 2000 is a campus core switch designed for larger campuses, It can be used with high-performance access switches like the FortiSwitch 600 to support larger and more complex campus environments.

“When you have more users [and] more bandwidth requirements, you want to make sure your uplink supports multigig performance,” which allows customers to connect the next-generation APs to support more users and IoT devices, Shah said.

The new Fortinet switches are the latest additions to its secure connectivity platform, which converges AI-powered security and network operations with the vendor’s LAN, wireless LAN (WLAN) and 5G offerings with unified management, accelerated by the vendor’s custom ASIC chips, touted Shah.

Gartner acknowledged this integrated architecture in its 2022 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure report. “Fortinet delivers an architecture in which LAN, WLAN and security are tightly integrated under a unified operating system (FortiOS) and cloud management platform,” analysts wrote.

The Fortinet switch customers can use FortiManager for management or the vendor’s FortiGate next-generation firewalls as switching controllers to eliminate overlays, Shah said. “The good thing about the controller is it is not only controlling the switches and access point that we have developed and we have some really good innovations around, [but] also extending the security from the next generation firewall to the switches and APs.”

Additionally, Shah pointed out that typically security has been an afterthought for networking. But Fortinet’s new switches are integrated with the vendor’s FortiGuard security services including advanced malware protection, intrusion prevention system (IPS), sandboxing and web filtering.

The new Fortinet 600 and 2000 campus switches integrate with FortiAIOps, which uses AI/machine learning (ML) for data collection and identification of network anomalies. The vendor feeds the dataset from all of its network devices, including FortiAPs, FortiSwitches, FortiGates, Secure SD-WAN and FortiExtender to the FortiAIOps to enable insights and event correlation.

“What we have done is we use the AI and machine learning that we have developed for our security services where we process billions of data every day, the same thing for network operations,” Shah explained.

“So the data that we are getting from switching, wireless or firewall, all of this is connected to AIOps, where we process those and find out the different patterns,” he added. “This helps customers to understand where are the issues happening in the LAN and wireless LAN, and further help them to troubleshoot, further provide them insights,”