Fortinet is taking on hyperscale cloud security with the launch of the FortiGate 1800F next-generation firewall (NGFW), the company's first appliance to feature its seventh-generation network processor.

The company claims the NP7-based appliance is capable of simultaneously juggling millions of connections while securing large streams of data associated with 5G, IoT, health care, and gaming.

Nirav Shah, senior director of product solutions at Fortinet, explained that traditional firewalls are not designed to handle the kind of large flows of information — what he calls "elephant flows" — generated by 5G, IoT.

"If you think about the large data center or a campus where they deploy any of the firewalls today, they struggle with the performance and latency," Shah said. "NP7 provides them the great scalability and massive performance to make sure we can manage their internal risk."

The FortiGate 1800F's ability to manage a large number of simultaneous connections allows it to handle highly performance-sensitive applications like health care and gaming where consumer experience can be particularly challenging. Many games demand millions of connections per second and it's not always easy for firewalls to scale at that level, Shah said.

But while these capabilities add up to an appliance well suited to large data centers with intense data requirements, Fortinet says those same features make it well suited to the needs of hyperscalers.

Launching alongside the Fortinet firewall updates is FortiOS 6.4, which includes a flood of enhancements to the company's SD-WAN, security, and automation features. One of the most notable improvements come in the form of a new SD-WAN orchestrator, which now offers more granular controls over the company's security fabric and application analytics.

Shah said the improved orchestrator provides customers with greater automation while also making it easier to apply a policy to the SD-WAN and the NGFW at the same time.

The update also boosts zero-trust networking with the introduction of native device visibility and profiling, improved user identification and management, and on-and off-network visibility. FortiOS is also now able to extend greater protections to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications like Office 365.

The update also bolsters Fortinet's artificial intelligence (AI) portfolio with the launch of the vendor's FortiSOAR and FortiEDR platforms. These integrate assets from security, automation, and response (SOAR) provider CyberSponse and endpoint protection vendor enSilo — both of which Fortinet acquired in 2019.

The Fortinet firewall updates follow strong fourth-quarter performance and a string of announcements for the security and SD-WAN vendor.