As the networking landscape evolves in the wake of the pandemic, security and SD-WAN are more important than ever, said Fortinet CMO John Maddison during this week's Fortinet Accelerate virtual conference.

"Digital attack surfaces have increased enormously as the perimeter has gone from being a very narrow piece of the data center to being across the infrastructure," he said.

Enterprises face a complex security infrastructure with "too many vendors, too many point products, not enough people," and that makes it impossible to automate or meet compliance, according to Maddison.

The ongoing pandemic has only served to exacerbate the situation and reveal these challenges, he said. "With the current environment, what we're seeing is people trying to take advantage of the coronavirus and COVID-19."

The result has been an uptick in phishing attacks, and what Maddison described as a "huge increase" in ransomware.

Moreover and despite the hype, not every organization is moving to the cloud, he added.

"There are still private data centers. In fact, we've got some big financial customers building a hyperscale data center," Maddison said. "Yes, cloud is very important from a public perspective and infrastructure; there are a lot more [software-as-a-service] applications being used, but we're seeing some manufacturing organizations start to implement edge compute."

As such, Maddison said it's Fortinet's belief that a hybrid compute environment will dominate the landscape for a long time to come.

The growing perimeter and challenges of cloud infrastructure also put an emphasis on networking "because the network determines the quality of service," he said.

Similar to security, networking has become a focal point for Fortinet as hundreds of millions of workers are forced to telecommute in response to COVID-19, Maddison explained. This puts a strain on wide area networks that were never designed to support a massive influx of remote workers.

"We've had customers go from 10% of their workforce being teleworkers to almost 100%," Maddison said, adding that while most customers are using VPN agents on their computers and mobile devices, Fortinet has also seen users put SD-WAN hardware in their homes.

"SD-WAN is not just for branch," he said. "SD-WAN is fundamental technology all the way from the home, all the way into the cloud."

With the scene set, Maddison launched into a long-winded and rapid-fire update on the company's expansive networking and security portfolio.

To put it simply, it has been a busy year for the vendor.

While much of his speech was premised on breaking down the components that make up Fortinet's security fabric, Maddison also took a deep dive into some of the company's more recent announcements. These include the launch of the NP7 networking processor, the associated Fortigate 1800F and 4200F next-generation firewalls (NGFW), and new capabilities enabled by FortiOS 6.4.1, which will launch in the coming weeks.

Unlike many vendors that rely on black-box hardware or virtual network functions (VNFs) running on traditional x86 chipsets, Fortinet has a long tradition of doing things in hardware, specifically using ASICs.

And Fortinet is happy to make that distinction at every opportunity. Its investment in ASICs has allowed Fortinet's hardware to leapfrog its competitors on performance, Maddison claimed.

The NP7, which was launched in mid-February with the Fortigate 1800F NGFW, is designed to accelerate large network flow, freeing up the CPU for other functions.

On its own, the NP7 offers NGFW functionality at throughputs up to 200 Gb/s, and there are two of them in the 1800F. The processor also enables hardware acceleration of features like distributed denial of service (DDoS), virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN), and logging, Maddison added.

Fortinet last week took that to an extreme with the launch of the FortiGate 4200F NGFW, which boasts four NP7 processors. "This is a stunning new next-generation firewall," he said.

Fortinet's FortiOS also gained some substantial improvements with the release of version 6.4, including the vendor's new SD-WAN orchestrator that offers more granular controls over an enterprise's security fabric and application analytics. That improved orchestrator enables customers to apply a policy to the SD-WAN and the NGFW at the same time, according to the vendor.

The software update also introduced zero-trust networking, including native device visibility and profiling, improved user identification and management, and on-and off-network visibility.

Maddison also heralded the advancements of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) as critical for threat detection.

"The key is to detect, but then to respond as quickly as possible with automation, [security information and event management], and [security orchestration, automation, and response]," he said.

Fortinet introduced AI-based detection capabilities earlier this year with the launch of the vendor’s FortiSOAR and FortiEDR platforms.

"What you're trying to do here is automatically prevent, detect, and respond as quickly as possible to any cyber threat by applying artificial intelligence across the complete digital attack surface," Maddison explained. "We see going forward, AI, the ability to apply AI across the fabric, as the future to predict things that are going to happen."