Going “Open” with the Fortinet Fabric-Ready Partner Program

Good companies evolve; great companies push the market to evolve. Fortinet has collaborated with a cadre of best-in-class technology alliance partners to produce the industry’s first truly open security framework. The Fortinet Security Fabric is the culmination of technological and partnership initiatives to provide the market with a holistic security strategy designed to solve real-world problems. Today’s announcement expands Fortinet’s robust ecosystem of technology alliances by expanding the functionality of the Fortinet Security Fabric to complementary solutions. Partners in this program have validated the integration of their technology with the Security Fabric, are committed to sharing roadmaps for consistent interoperability, and will join in joint go-to-market initiatives.

The initial “anchor” set of Fabric-Ready program partners announced today include Brocade, Carbon Black, Centrify, Nozomi Networks, Palerra, Pulse Secure, Qualys, Tufin, UBIqube, Verisign, WhiteHat Security, and Ziften.  Additional partners will be announced in the coming months.

These partnerships validate our assertion that integration and collaboration are the only proven effective response to today’s sophisticated threat landscape. In April of this year, Fortinet introduced a new Security Fabric architecture. This new approach was designed to integrate security technologies for the endpoint, access layer, network, applications, data center, content, and cloud into a single collaborative security framework. The Security Fabric enables systems to share threat intelligence and management information, and provides unified policy enforcement. It also allows organizations, for the first time, to begin to orchestrate and view their entire attack surface through a single management interface or pane of glass. This unified architectural approach reduces complexity, and solves the business and technical problems of enabling actionable, effective, and coordinated responses to threats.

Organizations have already invested in an infrastructure of networking and security tools and platforms. These products are an essential part of their security strategy and defense capability. Extending the functionality and intelligence of the Fortinet Security Fabric to leading third-party solutions allows enterprises to maximize their existing investment in security technologies even further by bringing them together in a cohesive, integrated security strategy.

After Fortinet founded the community collaboration that became the Cyber Security Alliance - a consortium of security organizations that share critical threat intelligence – it became clear that the community needed mechanisms to make that information actionable. The Fabric was designed as the way forward to pull leading security technology vendors together to better address today’s complex threat challenges. Today’s announced Fabric-Ready Partner Program envisions that this new robust alliance and partnership program will serve as the bulwark for the entire security industry, meaning not only Information Technology, but Operations Technology and physical security as well. These Fabric-Ready Partners are also committed to maintaining and expanding this collaborative and interactive community of security solutions.  

As an essential element of the Security Fabric, Fortinet has developed a series of well-defined, open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), Open Authentication Technology, and standardized telemetry data that allow technology partners to become a seamless part of the Fortinet Security Fabric. Alliance solutions that integrate with the Fortinet Security Fabric are able to actively collect and share threat information, and distribute mitigation instructions in order to improve threat intelligence, enhance overall threat awareness, and broaden threat response from end to end.

The Fortinet Fabric-Ready Partner Program is Fortinet’s premium technology partnership program, and it was designed to create an ecosystem where cooperative engagement between leaders in their respective market segments can go to market with “Ready Baked” solution sets that cover the entire security attack surface for a company. This helps organizations easily deploy and maintain a secure set of services that “just work.”  Partner inclusion in the program signals to customers and the industry at large that an organization has collaborated with Fortinet to leverage the Fortinet Fabric APIs to deliver validated, end-to-end security solutions. Having the Fabric-Ready Partner Program in place enables organizations to quickly identify technically validated, integrated solutions that span the entire solution release lifecycle and add them to their security portfolio with confidence that they will expand and enhance their existing security investments. Pre-validated Fabric Ready solutions also serve to reduce the overall IT support burden, deployment time, and operational costs.

Fabric-Ready Program Partners also enjoy significant benefits from joining the program. Fortinet is the global leader in high-performance cybersecurity solutions. Partners benefit from the Fabric-Ready program by being allied with the market leader with the most widely deployed solutions, the #1 market share in security appliances shipped worldwide, and sustained, rapid growth. In addition, there are a variety of co-marketing benefits for Fabric-Ready partners, as described in the Fabric-Ready Partner Program Brochure. 

Another key component of today’s announcement is the public launch of FortiSIEM, Fortinet’s next-generation Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution. This innovative, purpose-built solution brings network and security information together under a unified, single-pane-of-glass Security and Network Operations Center. FortiSIEM was intentionally built around an open foundation of APIs to enable simple and rapid integration with sources of data to support the monitoring and management of network security, performance, and compliance. FortiSIEM’s patented and cross-correlated analytics integrates with hundreds of industry-leading (virtual and physical) networking devices, applications, and services, including both Fortinet and leading third-party security and networking solutions. 

Together, the Fortinet Fabric Ready Partner Program and the FortiSIEM solution demonstrate that Fortinet continues to be at the forefront of the security industry by providing open network security management and visibility, combined with actionable threat intelligence, across multi-vendor environments.