Fortinet upgrades for better cloud, SD-WAN protection

IDG

Fortinet has rolled out a new version of its FortiOS operating system that gives customers the ability to manage security capabilities across their cloud assets and software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) environments.

With FortiOS 5.6, the company’s Fortinet Security Fabric gives a view of customers’ public and private clouds – including Amazon Web Services and Azure – as well as assets on and their software-defined WANs, says John Maddison, Fortinet’s senior vice president of products.

+More on Network World: DARPA to eliminate “patch & pray” by baking chips with cybersecurity fortification+

The company is also announcing FortiCASB, a platform for securing applications purchased as part of SaaS offerings. FortiCASB is available at the end of the current quarter. It can be managed as part of the Fortinet Security Fabric.

That is an ecosystem of Fortine’st gear as well as that of 22 partners whose devices can become part of the fabric via APIs. Depending on the individual APIs, the level of integration can vary.

With the new management capabilities, customers can apply a single security policy, for example to block a particular botnet, and have it applied to all the security elements in their network that are part of the security fabric, he says.

+More on Network World: Cisco targets digital business transformation with new certifications+

The SD WAN capabilities support branch office protection by performing SSL inspection, VPN tunneling and traffic shaping.

The upgraded version of FortiOS is available now as part of FortiGate purchases.