Today’s networks are under more pressure than ever. We want them to do more, with more data, as quickly as possible.

While Wi-Fi 7 aims to address this with its promise to dramatically increase data transfer, lower latency and increase reliability, it is a new standard that introduces new security vulnerabilities.

Closing these gaps requires a new paradigm, according to Fortinet: The cybersecurity leader today announced what it calls the industry’s first secure networking tool integrated with Wi-Fi 7. The new access point FortiAP 441K is designed to increase speed and capacity, while the FortiSwitch T1024 was built to support dynamic Wi-Fi 7 bandwidth requirements.

“Threats continue to rise, ransomware continues to rise,” said Nirav Shah, Fortinet’s VP of products and solutions. “You have to have an AI [artificial intelligence]-powered, security first approach to the entire network infrastructure.”

Wi-Fi 7 is here

Just last week, the Wi-Fi Alliance introduced Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7, which incorporates capabilities for innovations that “rely on high throughput, deterministic latency and greater reliability for critical traffic.”

This will help advance such technologies as multi-user augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR), as well as immersive 3-D training, hybrid work, industrial IoT and others, according to the organization.

The alliance estimates that Wi-Fi 7 will see rapid adoption, with 223 million devices expected to enter the market this year, accelerating to 2.1 billion by 2028. The earliest adopters will be access points and devices including smartphones, PCs and tablets, while customer premises equipment (CPE) and AR/VR will gain early market traction.

“We forecast that in five years, over three-fourths of enterprise WLAN revenue will come from Wi-Fi 7 access points, driven by demand to make use of the new 6 GHz spectrum,” said Chris DePuy, technology analyst and cofounder of 650 Group.

He added that, “coincident with the introduction of Wi-Fi 7 availability, we see a trend where organizations will demand that their Wi-Fi infrastructure is very tightly integrated with its security infrastructure.”

With its new offering, Fortinet is well-positioned in this regard, he said, pointing out that the company “has aggressively incorporated security functions into its networking products.”

IoT causing network ‘push-pull’

The increased demands on today’s Wi-Fi networks could be compared to the push-pull between Windows and computer and CPU processing speeds back in the day, said Chris Hinsz, senior director for Fortinet products and solutions. Systems very quickly got “bogged down.”

“We see this push-pull with the networks as well,” he said.

This pressure is only accelerated by the ‘smart campus’ concept: Enterprise campuses incorporate automated blinds, HVAC systems and windows and a slew of other IoT devices.

“All this stuff is on the network, most of it’s wireless, all of it needs to work,” said Hinsz. “The number of apps and the things we want them to do is only going up, it’s only going to get worse.”

At the same time, IoT comes with its own unique security challenges. Hinsz called it “the wild wild west,” because many devices are locked in and organizations have limited control over their security configurations.

“These things do dramatically expand the risk profile of the network,” said Hinsz.

Faster speed, lower latency, ‘puncturing’ capabilities

To take advantage of Wi-Fi 7, organizations must ensure that their underlying network infrastructure can accommodate increased speed and capacity demands while also incorporating strong security controls, Hinsz noted.

Enterprises know they need a “convergence of network and security,” he said — which is what Fortinet is seeking to address with its two new devices, which come as part of the Fortinet Secure Networking platform.

The new FortiSwitch T1024 is equipped with 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) access and 90W power over Ethernet (PoE) technologies that support Wi-Fi 7 bandwidth requirements.

Meanwhile, the new Wi-Fi 7 access point FortiAP 441K aims to increase speed and capacity. It incorporates the Wi-Fi 7 Qualcomm Networking Pro 1220 Platform from Qualcomm Technologies and offers the following capabilities:

• Up to 2X faster connection speeds
• Support for 4096 QAM for faster data transfer
• Lower latency through the use of 320MHz channels
• Better load balancing and reduced interference
• Flexible channel utilization through preamble puncturing and advanced multi-link operation

Hinsz contended that, while a conceptually good idea, puncturing hadn’t been successfully used in Wi-Fi before. The process is important in instances of interference, he explained: Access points and clients can carve out slices of a channel to best use the spectrum.

“I’m going to snip out that small range of frequencies, I’m going to transmit around it,” Hinsz explained. “We all knew that having to give up on half the spectrum when interference showed up was harmful.”

Simplifying upgrades, bolstering security

Enterprises often see Wi-Fi rollouts as time-consuming and costly, Hinsz said.

“Anytime you start deploying Wi-Fi, you always have issues around who’s going to do that, how you’re going to deploy it,” he said. “It’s the biggest reason people drag their heels on refreshing their wireless, they know it’s a real hassle.”

Fortinet Secure Networking can help simplify the process and cut rollout time due to its fabric approach, he contended. Switches are natively part of the platform and organizations don’t have to create new security configurations.

“It’s the idea of actually using a security appliance as a network controller,” said Hinsz.

NetOps is also critical to the platform, and security intelligence from Fortiguard Labs is layered in, as well.

Shah said that Fortinet’s researchers process large amounts of data from network devices and use AI and ML to understand patterns that are either already on their radar or “completely unknown” (that is, zero-day threats). The lab processes and puts to work a “magnitude of data” — offering more than 1 billion-plus updates everyday.

“The power of AI is best when we can have a real world scenario where we’re gathering data and finding patterns,” Shah said.