Enable Deep Security Fabric Integration with Fortinet Fabric Connectors

Today we are excited to announce that Fortinet is expanding our Fabric-Ready Program to drive deeper integration into partner and third party technology platforms. Organizations with multi-vendor environments (which are the majority of enterprises worldwide) will benefit significantly from this new open integration approach to security being delivered by Fortinet Fabric Connectors.

What problem do Fabric Connectors solve in customer networks?

Enterprise ecosystems now include multiple forms of cloud (PaaS, IaaS, SaaS), IoT, SDN, and mobile environments built around a growing number of third party /open-source technologies. The technology landscape isn’t just expanding, however. It is also dynamic and constantly evolving to enable new business capabilities, drive revenue, and exploit the business potential of data.

This has resulted in a highly diverse, and increasingly complex multi-vendor IT environment comprised of a plethora of security tools, alerts, and processes that must be manually correlated for each task related to an operational incident. Such manual processes are not only cumbersome, error prone, and drain IT productivity, but also delay the ability to deliver a coordinated response to detected threats. Given the speed and sophistication of today’s cyber attacks, this approach to security is simply a crisis waiting to happen. Fully integrated end-to-end security coverage is now more important than ever.

Fortinet Fabric Connectors are designed to address this challenge by extending Fabric openness to enable security automation and DevOps in even the most complex multi-vendor ecosystems. They do this in several ways:

·      Open, deep integration into customer’s security ecosystem automates dynamic policy synchronization across hybrid networks

·      Eases the security management burden by eliminating the need for manual processes and human intervention for many security tasks

·      Accelerates time to market for new development by reducing latency in DevOps processes

·      Unifies security and management throughout the technology ecosystem to enable better protection across the entire attack surface

Fabric Connectors automate security workflows, tighten SOC environments, correlate threat feeds, and seamlessly enforce consistent security across the distributed security infrastructure, including multi-cloud environments. They also help organizations seamlessly extend security to new use cases as additional platforms, services, and applications are deployed, removing the need for subsequent manual cyber event correlation and intervention.

Open and extensible, Fabric Connectors offer deep integration to a growing number of technology platforms where security automation is critical. Initial Fabric Connector types include Cloud, SDN, Threat Feeds, IT Service Management (ITSM) & Incident Response, Automation Action, SSO/Identity, IaaS Visibility, and Endpoint/CVE (common vulnerabilities and exposure). 

These Fabric Connectors are instantly accessible to customers through easy, downloadable DevOps kits with one-click activation. Once deployed, they link directly into partner solutions through deep API-based or specific code integration that instantly make FortiGate and Security Fabric capabilities available to the partner platform. 

Fabric Connectors make the power of Security Fabric immediately available to third party platforms. For example, the AWS GuardDuty Connector, available with FortiOS 6.0, integrates FortiGate with the AWS GuardDuty service. The FortiGate ingests Guard Duty data as a generalized threat intelligence feed to not only immediately remediate traffic, but can also be combined with FortiGuard and other third-party threat feeds for deeper Fabric intelligence, automation, and threat response.

In another example, the Fabric Connector automates the quarantining of compromised endpoints in the network. When an IOC (indicator of compromise) is identified, FortiGate can initiate an auto-quarantine using the EMS of the compromised endpoint, thereby eliminating the need for manual configuration. Quarantined endpoints are then visible in Fabric topology views for further analysis and remediation.

Fabric Connectors are available for a growing number of platforms in the customer ecosystem, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Cisco ACI, Oracle Cloud, ServiceNow, VMware NSX, Nuage Networks VSP. They automate dynamic object changes in multi-vendor environments while enabling advanced security, consistent management and orchestration and reducing latency in the network. All of which makes it easier for IT teams to focus on new service delivery and revenue generation because security has been automated and the attack surface is dynamically protected.

The answer to increasing network complexity is simplicity. Which is why Fortinet has also made Fabric Connectors available free of charge to joint Fortinet and Fabric-Ready Partner customers as part of the latest FortiOS 6.0 release.