The convergence of operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) impacts the security of industrial control systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. As the air gap is removed, these systems are exposed to an expanding threat landscape and are targets for hackers involved in terrorism, cyber warfare, and espionage. Extending well beyond the traditional factory plant floor, attacks on critical infrastructures such as power plants, factories, water treatment systems, oil rigs, and traffic control systems can result in threats to national security, financial loss, risk to brand reputation, and even loss of life.
For more than a decade, Fortinet has protected OT environments in critical infrastructure sectors such as energy, defense, manufacturing, food, and transportation. By designing security into complex infrastructure via the Fortinet Security Fabric, organizations have an efficient, non-disruptive way to ensure that the OT environment is protected and compliant.
What’s new in FortiOS 7.2
With over 300 new features and enhancements, this FortiOS release empowers the Fortinet Security Fabric by introducing new security features, increasing the degree of convergence, and simplifying security management for operational technology (OT) environments.
These new features demonstrate Fortinet’s commitment to addressing OT challenges:
- Asset Identity Center: Visualize connected assets in your OT network through dashboards that display the network topology using the Purdue model. See which assets are communicating within and across the Purdue Levels.
- Security policy improvements: Learn how OT traffic is flowing leveraging the new monitor and learn capability then create new policies with a simplified policy interface.
- Access network visibility: Enhanced FortiSwitch Topology view now shows important statistics in a single pane.
- Air-gap license activation: Simplify and streamline licensing in environments even when they are isolated from the Internet.
Fortinet’s solution integrates OT security solutions with best-of-breed threat protection for corporate IT environments that extend from the data center, to the cloud, to the network perimeter. It also provides visibility, control, and automated at speed analytics detection within the OT environment while provisioning built-in support for industry standards. Additionally, it minimizes complexity and reduces the operating expense (OpEx) of OT security management, when compared to point security solutions in siloed IT and OT environments.