SD-WAN, edge computing, and automation are the keys to the next generation of enterprise security, said Fortinet CEO Ken Xie during a keynote at the RSA Conference in San Fransisco this week.

"There is a lot changing today making the perimeter security no longer enough," he said. "Even after these 30-40 years, [networks] are still running the same [security] protocol, and they still don't go beyond the connectivity and speed."

Network security today is at a turning point, where traditional perimeter-based security is no longer sufficient, security surfaces and compute demands are ballooning, and network complexity has made managing threats practically untenable. Xie says the answer to these challenges involves a combination of existing technologies like SD-WAN, edge computing, and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven automation, which, unsurprisingly, are all areas in which Fortinet has invested heavily.

As companies migrate to the cloud, embrace software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, deploy WiFi, and institute bring-your-own-device policies, networks are growing more difficult to secure. To address these complexities, Xie says enterprises and security vendors need to adopt an infrastructure-wide approach. "We need to target the entire infrastructure wherever there is a connection," he said.

Here, SD-WAN comes into play.

"SD-WAN is the first time you can look at the application layer, and then you can decide how the traffic goes through it," he said, adding that SD-WAN enables security to do more than look at where the connection is coming from and the content being accessed. With the addition of SD-WAN, enterprises will be able to apply security in ways previously impossible, allowing security teams to make decisions based a larger set of information ranging from what the content is, who the user is, what device is being used, and the source of the connection, Xie explained.

In the last three or four decades, the components that make up network security have ballooned. "The challenge we have now is how to have all of this computing power to deal with all this content level data … in a very fast networking environment," Xie said.

But while some vendors have turned to the cloud in an attempt to address this challenge, Xie said the cloud isn't the answer. "By going to the cloud you're not adding additional security, you're actually more vulnerable because you need to deal with sharing your data with other tenancy, you have to deal with access control, you have to deal with the supply chain, and other things that are probably not in your control because you had to put the data somewhere."

Instead, Xie said the answer can be found at the edge. "Ninety-eight percent of data is generated on the edge, not by the cloud," he said. "By Gartner, almost 80% of data from the edge never travels to the cloud."

This data feeds and informs Xie's security-driven approach to networking, but it also introduces another challenge: how do you process all that data?

"You have to have some acceleration beyond the general-purpose CPU," he said. "You need to have dedicated hardware, a dedicated ASIC to boost your computing power to close the gap, otherwise you will see the gap is going to get bigger and bigger and network security is going to get slower and slower."

However, the idea that ASICs will play an essential role in addressing the compute problem should come as no surprise given Fortinet's reliance on them for their suite of Forti-branded appliances.

Earlier this Month, Fortinet announced a strategic partnership that would see its appliances colocated in Equinix's data centers, putting the vendor's services just that much closer to customer's data.

The final challenge outlined by Xie is how to tame the operational nightmare that network security is quickly becoming.

"All this old functionality never goes away, and there is always a new function getting added every year," he said, adding that the way forward is to build integrations into these functions so they can be automated, and in the process reduce operational costs.

Fortinet's newly announced FortiAI security appliance is designed to do just that by leveraging machine learning and AI to identify and classify threats in real time. Fortinet's goal with the appliance is to give customers tools to reduce the workload faced by security operations teams.

"I do believe now is the time for the security vendor to reduce management costs," Xie said.