LONDON, UK, October 20th, 2008 - Fortinet® - a pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions - today announced it has formed a partnership with the leading international capital markets consultancy, NET2S. The partnership focuses on delivering high value security and compliance solutions to the banking, investment management and insurance sectors.

"Security and compliance has been woven in the fabric of the way financial institutions conduct their business. Whether it's accelerating electronic trading and market data, logging a transaction in a secure database, securing customer data, or reporting to the auditors the right information, these are challenges that Fortinet address" said Paul Judd, regional director for UK and Ireland at Fortinet.

NET2S provides strategic consultancy, optimises critical business flows and processes, and designs optimal architectures based on the selection of best of breed technologies - all based on real-life, hands-on experience of the implementation and operation of these solutions. By partnering with Fortinet, NET2S will be able to provide an enterprise security platform that enables businesses to increase their security whilst significantly improving performance and reducing cost.

"It has always been assumed that information security was a necessary impediment to our clients' real-time business requirements; that it was the price to pay for safety and compliance," said Frederic Ponzo, Managing Director of NET2S. "That fatalistic view has been proven wrong by Fortinet. We thoroughly evaluated all the solutions in the market and Fortinet came out as the only technology really capable of providing the most stringent levels of security whilst significantly reducing latency."

Purpose-built and integrated to provide total visibility and control, Fortinet's award-winning solutions allow organisations to secure their environment and adhere to compliance whilst reducing the complexity and cost associated with traditional solutions. With FortiASIC acceleration, multiple FortiGate™ secure gateways are enabled with support for 10-Gigabit Ethernet communications-enabling and protecting high-speed core and datacentre networks.

"Fortinet has a significant number of finance customers globally and we are consistently finding that increasing performance and reducing latency are key challenges", said Paul Judd. "Increasing operational efficiency and realising a quick ROI have become even more important in recent times across the finance industry."