Fortinet, the global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions, has introduced its FortiGate 6000F Series of Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW). The first in the series, the FortiGate 6000F incorporates a new hardware processing architecture that delivers the validated performance of a Fortinet chassis in a compact appliance form-factor to carry out advanced security for exponentially increasing enterprise traffic.
John Maddison, Senior Vice President of Products and Solutions, Fortinet, said: “Enterprise adoption of the cloud is massively increasing the volume of traffic that needs to be inspected at the enterprise edge. Add to this the ever-increasing percentage of encrypted traffic and today’s NGFW’s need to perform at levels unheard of five years ago. The FortiGate 6000F high-end firewall series is built upon a new architecture that delivers the industry’s highest threat protection and encryption inspection performance to ensure enterprises can scale their defences and meet the evolving needs of their business.”
Increase in multi-cloud networks and encrypted traffic requires security speed and scale
Multi-cloud environments and the increasing use of IoT and mobile devices to access mission-critical applications are drastically increasing the volume of encrypted data on enterprise edge networks. The adoption of these technologies is also increasing bandwidth, throughput and session capacity requirements that are driving enterprises to modernise their edge networks.
Additionally, the expanded digital attack surface and complex threat landscape is escalating the need for advanced security protections that can be applied with speed and scale across all connected devices. Security appliances need to be able to deliver the high performance required to protect encrypted traffic at the enterprise edge with a compact, modern interface that can seamlessly grow capacity in a smaller, efficient physical footprint.
The next-generation of FortiGate
Fortinet’s new F-series includes the FortiGate 6300F and FortiGate 6500F, which are high-performance, compact and easy to manage NGFW appliances that are integrated within the Fortinet Security Fabric.
- Advanced security capabilities and performance: The 6000F series are the industry’s fastest NGFW appliances, delivering advanced threat protection and SSL inspection performance to handle massive volumes of traffic at the network edge.
- High speed and flexible interfaces: High density zSFP+ and QSFP28 interfaces support 10G, 40G, 100Gbps and new 25G data rates to provide high speed connectivity and increased flexibility as enterprises migrate to higher density designs.
- Security Fabric Integration: FortiGate firewalls serve as the foundation of the Fortinet Security Fabric and run FortiOS, the world’s most deployed network security operating system. The Fortinet Security Fabric provides broad, integrated and automated security that is required to protect the vast digital attack surface created by digital transformation.
Next-generation hardware architecture
An industry first for a security appliance, Fortinet’s next-generation hardware architecture leverages compact internal processing cards that are miniaturised versions of the blades typically used in cutting-edge modular security chassis. Each processing card combines multiple 12-core CPUs, Security Processing Units (SPUs) and Content (CP9) and Network Processors (NP6) into a discrete unit. The FortiGate 6000F series can support up to 10 discrete processing cards in a 3U appliance.
The innovative design enables traditionally chassis-only benefits like high resilience and session scale while also delivering advanced security capabilities at breakthrough speeds never before seen in a compact appliance form-factor. The architecture provides additional benefits like hardware load balancing using new custom Distribution Processors (DP3) that intelligently assign tasks between the discrete processing cards.
Stuart Berman, Global Security Architect at Steelcase, said: “Our use of the cloud continues to expand to meet the evolving business needs of our users and customers. This growth has increased the amount of traffic crossing our networks and created an imperative to continue to maintain security standards across our entire infrastructure without impacting business productivity. Our extended IT infrastructure is absolutely critical to everything we do, so it’s invaluable to have the security performance and seamless protection that Fortinet provides across our physical and cloud-based domains.”
Pascal Perot, VP Strategic Alliances, Security at ePlus, said: “Cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular, but gaps in protection can occur if security solutions can’t keep pace with agile public, private and hybrid cloud environments. The growth of IoT and Mobility also puts large demands on performance and security architectures as data traverses these end points. ePlus recognises these advances and has invested significantly in providing our customers with comprehensive security solutions to meet these growing demands. We are proud to partner with Fortinet and leverage their robust platform to both scale and secure these transformative environments.”
Fortinet, has also recently announced that its FortiGate Virtual Machine (VM) is now available for Google Cloud Platform customers, delivering on-demand consumption while providing multiple layers of security for dynamic enterprise cloud networks.
John Maddison, Senior Vice President of Products and Solutions at Fortinet, said: “The majority of organisations are leveraging cloud computing to accelerate their digital business strategies and growth. As such, infrastructure requirements for on-demand resources that can automatically and securely scale with business demands are rapidly evolving, making security transformation a critical requirement for these multi-cloud networks. Through our collaboration with Google Cloud, we are now offering the broad visibility, integrated threat detection and automated response capabilities of Fortinet cloud security to Google Cloud customers.”
Delivering broad security visibility and automated policies for Google Cloud customers
Cloud computing is a key enabler of enterprise digital transformation strategies. As businesses move applications out of on-premise data centres to public cloud infrastructure to benefit from the agility and scale of cloud resources, consistent security control and policies are critical. Protecting these highly dynamic multi-cloud environments requires a Security Fabric with tightly-integrated security features and network technologies that share intelligence on advanced threats and automate responses in real-time.
Fortinet is working with partners like Google Cloud to enable enterprises to accelerate their digital business through cloud computing, while ensuring the consistent security and privacy of customer and organisational data across the cloud. Through the Fortinet Security Fabric, Fortinet provides enterprise customers with a single pane of glass view of FortiGate VMs and other security applications across Google Cloud, on-premise, as well as hybrid cloud environments.
“Google Cloud’s highly-scalable and secure infrastructure enables customers to increase agility, lower costs and reduce IT complexity. Collaborating with Fortinet on the availability of FortiGate VM provides customers with additional visibility and control for their Google Cloud Platform workloads,” Adam Massey, Director, Strategic Technology Partners, Google Cloud.
