Securing Your Azure Deployment with the Fortinet Security Fabric

Azure has established itself as one of the leading cloud providers worldwide, with 58% of all enterprise cloud users running applications in Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, and a market-leading YoY growth rate of 35%. It is also positioned as a leader in terms of supported development environments, enterprise migration path flexibility, and as the easiest platform to use for regulatory compliance. At the same time as enterprises continue to adopt more cloud solutions and services, especially multi-cloud, however, the need for consistent security is also on the rise.

New Fortinet Security Fabric Capabilities for Azure

This week during Microsoft’s Ignite conference, we introduced new Fortinet Security Fabric capabilities for the Azure cloud, further establishing our leadership position of offering the broadest, most consistent security capability sets across all public clouds. With these new capabilities for Azure, we now support even more cloud security use cases for our customers.

New Fortinet support for the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform includes:

Advanced Threat Prevention – An increasing percentage of essential business applications are now being deployed over public cloud infrastructures. At the same time, web and email applications are responsible for the highest number of breaches per pattern. To address the challenge of securing critical business resources, regardless of their location, the Fortinet Security Fabric for Azure includes solutions designed to protect business-critical applications from known and zero-day attacks.

Fortinet Security Fabric solutions such as FortiWeb, FortiMail, and FortiSandbox run natively in the Azure cloud environment. This combination of advanced threat prevention not only helps ensure consistent security enforcement, but empowers organizations to better control resources by relieving the need to constantly apply patches to servers. It also supports compliance with regulatory and security standards such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Additionally, FortiSandbox can protect collaboration web sites from the risks associated with advanced persistent threats resulting from malicious file uploads.

Securing Office 365 – Due to the high attachment rate of Office 365 with Azure cloud deployments, the fact that the majority of threats still find their way into organizations via email, and that email-based attacks are more sophisticated than ever, the need to secure Office 365-based email and business applications is higher than ever. The combination of critical security services provided by the integrated deployment of FortiMail, FortiSandbox, and FortiCASB solutions provide critical capabilities when securing Office 365. In particular, the Security Fabric enables deep visibility into mail messages to protect organizations from zero-day threats, while simultaneously monitoring the Office 365 API layer.

These new capabilities come on top of our support for Cloud Services vNET security, Secure Access VPNs on Azure, and the various hybrid cloud deployment scenarios we have supported in the past.

Growth of Multi-Cloud Computing

While Azure is seeing some of the highest growth rates in the industry, it isn’t alone. The trend towards implementing multi-cloud strategies is helping all of the major cloud providers realize sustained growth, with 81% of enterprises adopting multiple cloud providers for production workloads.

Here at Fortinet, we’ve been observing our customers increasingly use both AWS and Azure, along with taking the Office 365 route to provide their end users with cloud-based productivity applications and email rather than refreshing their on-premise Exchange deployments. As these customers increasingly rely on third-party infrastructure, however, they also have a growing need to apply advanced, multi-layer security that seamlessly spans multiple cloud environments in order to provide the same level of control, visibility, and policy consistency across their mix of infrastructures as they had when running their business entirely on-premises.

Fortinet’s Cloud Security Strategy

Fortinet actively supports this critical requirement through our three-pillar approach to cloud security, which is comprised of the following principles:

Native Integration – Integration seamlessly extends consistent security across the platforms of every major cloud provider, enabling organizations to define security similarly across their multi-cloud and on-premises deployments. Likewise, native integration provides the ability to natively consume cloud services by security products, providing faster and more seamless protection and response, and extends the web service-based APIs of products that are running in the cloud

Broad Protection – Offering the broadest set of security products both in and off the cloud allows customers to consistently build the most secure infrastructures possible, regardless of deployment mode, workflow complexity, or degree of distribution and elasticity. The ability to natively integrate into the cloud infrastructure allows Fortinet to uniquely offer multiple security products in—and between—the cloud environments offered by every major cloud service provider to help customers build consumable and automation-ready security services to protect their cloud applications regardless of where they choose to deploy them.

Management & Automation – In order to make the best use of their often limited and overstretched security personnel, Fortinet provides customers with a unique single-pane-of-glass solution that empowers them to consistently manage the broad set of protection services that we have natively integrated into the cloud infrastructure. This approach also enables the ability to automate the management of these capabilities through the use of standard web-based APIs, as well as consume predefined automation recipes. By extending this automation framework across multiple cloud environments, customers can integrate the consumption of security services into their emerging DevOps-oriented application lifecycles while supporting a more agile application and business operation.

Conclusion

Fortinet is committed to securing today’s businesses. To do that, we provide the most robust portfolio of top-rated security tools in the industry, combined with the flexibility to support and protect whatever networking and computing strategies organizations need in order to compete in today’s digital marketplace.

Our efforts to continually provide deeper and broader solutions for any cloud environment, including Microsoft Azure, underscores our commitment to providing consistent protection across the entire distributed enterprise, from edge to core, to mobile, IoT, and branch office deployments, and across multi-cloud environments.