Winning With FortiCloud Services

SaaS (Software as a Service) and MaaS (Management as a Service) are nothing new to the IT industry – especially given that we are well and truly in the ‘Cloud Era.’ Whether your organization is large or small, there are many benefits to the adoption of these cloud-based services, including:

1. Reduced Time to Complete Deployment and Configuration: With SaaS, everything is already installed and mostly pre-configured, which means you can be up and running within minutes or hours.
   
   
2. Lower Costs: The SaaS vendor takes care of the management and maintenance of the servers and the application. This can mean that you need less dedicated expertise, which typically translates into lower costs.
   
   
3. Scalability and Software updates: One of the big benefits of the cloud is its elasticity! You (or your vendor) may never run out of resources. Patching, upgrades, and maintenance of applications and the servers that they run on – these are all the vendor’s concerns.
   
   
4. Trials and Proof of Concepts: Try out the software before you buy it to check that it works for you and works in your environment. With the ease of the cloud, you can be on your way to an evaluation faster and more cost effectively than if you had to install, configure, manage, and integrate it with your environment.

To add to this list, the benefits extend well beyond the end user and into the service provider. Done right, SaaS has all the multi-tenancy functionality that makes managing and maintaining your customer base a snap. Just as importantly, it makes partners more competitive in what is seemingly a cloud-first world. Cloud services are typically low touch and low cost – eliminating trips to customer locations, and so on – providing cost savings that can all be passed on to the customer.

So How Does Security Play into This and Why Should You Care?

Much like your typical SaaS applications, such as Salesforce and Office365, security is also becoming increasingly available as a service, and as a result, benefits from the same list of attributes outlined above. Deploying disparate systems from disparate vendors to achieve a desired end result, however, can become problematic, time consuming, and even require specialist attention.

In the security world, attacks are typically automated. In the worst case, you don’t even know you are being attacked. Or maybe you know you are being attacked, but don’t know where the attack is coming from or which lever to pull to make it stop! Being an automated attack also typically means that it can work faster than you can think. What you need is security to protect all threat vectors, across your entire network and infrastructure, and that can then provide you with threat correlation, and automated response and remediation.

This is the functionality that is at the heart of Fortinet’s products – whether they are deployed as physical, virtual, cloud (private and/or public), or SaaS form factor versions of the security products, they are all interconnected by Fortinet’s Fabric. This means the products are already integrated, and so they naturally interact to provide correlation, remediation, and automated response. When correctly configured, the first you will likely know of a security incident is in a log report or notification that highlights the attack and how it was dealt with.

Fortinet’s SaaS and MaaS Services

With the accelerating adoption of cloud-based security services, Fortinet moved to providing many of their security products as SaaS offerings some time ago. Today, there are ten such services that you can have up and running in minutes, and together they make up the most common products that you would use to secure your environment:

• FortiGate Cloud: Fortinet’s cloud-based firewall management tool
• FortiAP: Providing integrated and secure wireless access
• FortiExtender: The company’s secure LTE wireless WAN extender, providing 3G/4G connectivity for reliable broadband to the internet
• FortiSwitch: Delivers a secure, simple, scalable Ethernet solution with outstanding security, performance, and manageability
• FortiManager: Offers customers automation-driven and single pane-of-glass management capabilities
• FortiPresence: Fortinet’s WiFi presence analytics and customer engagement solution
• FortiToken: Offers customers secure cloud management of two-factor authentication (2FA) for FortiGate
• FortiCASB: Offers customers cloud security analytics and posture management
• FortiMail: Fortinet’s hosted email security
• FortiWeb: The company’s cloud-based web application firewall-as-a-service

The FortiCloud Services Partner Opportunity

FortiCloud Services help Fortinet partners become more operationally efficient through automation and centralized management, and they offer flexible business models that help partners scale with their customers’ needs. In addition, the wide variety of FortiCloud Services available allow partners to offer features with devices designed for high performance security, translating to quicker ROI for operating expenses and more opportunity for partners and their customers.

Conclusion

Everyone benefits from the cloud’s ‘always on’ nature, and its ability to be available from anywhere, on any device, from any location. Fortinet’s security MaaS and SaaS offerings are no different, providing many advantages that help lead to better security combined with Fabric elements that that are broad, integrated, and automated — all of which come together to provide the best security in whatever form factor best suits your needs.

Read our news release from today: "Fortinet Rapidly Expands Its Partner Focused Security as a Service Cloud Offerings With Additional FortiCloud Offerings"

Find out how Fortinet’s Security Fabric delivers broad, integrated, and automated protection across an organization’s entire digital attack surface from IoT to the edge, network core and to multi-clouds. 

Read these customer case studies to see how Cuebiq and Steelcase implement Fortinet’s multi-cloud services for secure connectivity and application security.