M+E Daily

As companies have asked networks to do more, it has become increasingly difficult to secure and maintain them, according to cybersecurity company Fortinet.

During the Jan. 19 webinar “Envision a Better Way to Ensure Secure Local Area Networks,” the company explained how it’s converging networking and security to offer a solution unlike any other in the industry.

Two of the firm’s experts demonstrated how the Fortinet Local Area Network (LAN) Edge solution offers simple but pervasive security at the LAN. The solution simplifies management while offering more features and requiring less licensing compared to others, according to the company.

They also explained the benefits of a solution focused on features, security and platform integration with built-in threat intelligence.

“We’re going to talk to you about a better way to ensure secure local area networks and kind of go through some of the features that we offer here at Fortinet,” Christoper Hinsz, senior director of product and solutions at Fortinet, said at the start of the event.

“Now we’ve talked, I think before in some of these webinars, but it’s always good to look back a little and understand how we’ve gotten to where we have with the market,” he told viewers.

“If you go back – and we kind of [group] things by decades in a sense here – so if you feel like it’s not the exact borders, that’s fine,” he said. “But we really start off as an idea of just basic connectivity: I have devices, I need them to be able to connect to [a] network and the things on the network; if you can just make that connection happen, I’m happy.”

He explained: “Once we got to connectivity pretty quickly, we got into the whole speeds and feeds work. And this is where you had sort of every vendor arguing that ‘mine’s faster than this guy’s’ or ‘I get an extra couple inches of coverage on high AP than someone else’s,’ And that went on for a while,” he said.

But he told viewers: “As that has matured, as the technology has gotten better, we start to see a new shift to converge platform. People want to have better manageability of a large set of their network solutions all coming together in a single place. And we’ve kind of been living in this new converge paradigm.”

And “we’ve been living in this new paradigm for a couple years now, and we kind of talk about this as converged networking and security,” he noted, adding: “This is something that, when you hear from Fortinet, you will hear a lot about … the idea of bringing together the ideas of enterprise networking, which has a lot of pieces that folks I’m sure here tuning in today are familiar with,” including switching and Wi-Fi.

That also includes technology like 5G that he said “people are using to secure their applications or your locations, verifying identity, etc. And we try to really offer solutions that exist in this middle zone, where you can bring the two together and offer what we call [a] secure network.”

Now, he noted, “everything comes together around firewalls” and “zero trust starts to come into play.”

And “we understand, particularly as we’ve asked networks to do more, that building the security, [LANs] can really be challenging, not to mention time consuming,” he said.

So the company looked to “provide something that’s secure” but not too “complicated,” he explained, noting: “A lot of people will often point out that complexity is the enemy of good security in a lot of ways.”

Fortinet also wanted to “make sure that we can then bring … security intelligence, as well as just networking intelligence to make [the] network deliver everything that you need to as you’re going through your day-to-day jobs … so you, as an IT professional, don’t have to worry about these things,” he added.

James Allen, director of product and solutions at Fortinet, then discussed some related data and trends.

“There’s a lot of trends that are really driving the vision that we presented to you,” said Allen. “As we look at security as a business risk, you know, 70 percent [of respondents to] a recent survey from Deloitte reported that cyber was on their board’s agenda on a regular basis, either quarterly or monthly.”

Allen added: From Fortinet’s perspective, we try to make sure we take a secure networking or security-driven approach. We really look to offer a solution that is secure by design … so it’s not about what I can add into my solution, my wired or my wireless solution, to make it secure, but converging next-generation firewall features and functionality and inspection into the wired and wireless network.”