Fortinet Extends Cloud Security Reach

Cloud security is obviously a top of mind issue for most IT organizations considering employing a public cloud. The challenge they face, however, is that cloud security is one of those many IT things that is a lot easier to say versus achieve.

Aiming to make it simpler to consistently implement security across multiple clouds, Fortinet today added a cloud security access broker (CASB) to its portfolio, in addition to improving the performance of the of the virtual machines that Fortinet employs to make its security software widely available by a factor of three.

Finally, Fortinet has also made its software available on demand via the Microsoft Azure cloud in addition to improving the way its software automatically scales on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

John Maddison, senior vice president of products and solutions at Fortinet, says that the goal is to make it simpler to manage security across what are becoming highly distributed cloud computing environments without having to manage and maintain different security policies.

“Organizations need to able to have a single security policy,” says Maddison.

Most organizations today are a long way from implementing a true hybrid cloud computing environment. But most of them are making use of multiple public and private clouds regardless of what security concerns they might have. The Fortinet approach, says Maddison, to solving that problem from a security perspective is to create a unified fabric that allows policies to be implemented consistently across every cloud platform.

Of course, organizations need to have a relatively mature approach to cloud computing to appreciate the benefits of a security fabric. But given the current rate of adoption of public clouds, reaching that level of maturity is now more a question of when rather than if.