Fortinet lent overworked and understaffed security operations (SecOPs) teams a helping hand today with the launch of FortiAI, an artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced security appliance designed to identify and classify threats in real time.

"FortiAI is designed to optimize security operations, enhance the productivity of the security analysts, and to reduce the false-positive rate," said Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, VP of Fortinet's global field CISO team, in an interview with SDxCentral.

To do this, FortiAI utilizes a "self-learning" deep neural network (DNN) to automate rote security tasks to accelerate threat detection and remediation.

"The practical reality is the complexity is expanding beyond the ability of conventional security operations to keep pace and so artificial intelligence and its subsets in machine learning and deep learning are all designed to automate those more mundane tasks," Nguyen-Duy explained.

But while FortiAI can be used to identify threats as a standalone device, it's not in itself designed to mitigate them. Instead, Nguyen-Duy says mitigation can be achieved when the appliance is tied into Fortinet's existing security fabric, which includes threat intelligence from FortiGuard Labs; FortiSandbox for automated breach protection; FortiEDR for AI-enhanced endpoint protection; FortiInsight for endpoint monitoring; FortiWeb for web application security; and FortiSIEM for anomaly detection. From there, FortiAI works to automate manual tasks like security sweeps and identify and classify threats in real-time.

Once a threat has been detected by FortiAI, it surfaces the threat to the security team and prescribes a resolution. Fortinet says this has the benefit of substantially reducing alert noise and false positives that can be introduced by human error.

FortiAI repackages FortiGuard Labs' AI capabilities for use in on-premise appliances. According to Nguyen-Duy, this is a big advantage because it allows FortiAI to be deployed in highly-sensitive environments where the network may be air-gapped. He said in an environment like this, a cloud-based AI simply wouldn't work.

Today's announcement is just the latest in a steady stream of product launches from Fortinet. Since posting robust earnings earlier this month, the SD-WAN and security vendor has taken several steps to enhance and diversify its offerings.

Less than a week ago, Fortinet announced a flood of improvements to its FortiOS security operating system and a new next-generation firewall designed for large enterprises and hyperscale cloud providers called the FortiGate 1800F. The NP7-based firewall is designed to simultaneously juggle millions of connections while securing large streams of data associated with 5G, IoT, health care, and gaming.

The company also recently launched a smaller, branch-focused SD-WAN appliance and unveiled a partnership with colocation vendor Equinix to make it easier for enterprises to move their workloads entirely into the cloud.

Editors note: This story has been updated the clarify that FortiAI is a standalone appliance designed to identify and classify threats in real time.