"Customers are looking at an integrated security solution framework"

Manoj Kanodia, CEO - Inspira Enterprise India Pvt. Ltd. gets into a candid chat with VARINDIA to share details about his company’s association with Fortinet while also talking about the challenges and opportunities he sees in the security space and how by coming together with Fortinet is Inspira trying to meet up with customer expectations -

Could you tell us more about your business in the IT sector and your association with Fortinet?

Inspira Enterprise is a leading digital transformation company that combines bold thinking, path breaking technologies and years of expertise to transform businesses and organizations around the world.  Headquartered in Mumbai, Inspira has satellite offices pan India, Singapore, UAE, Africa and the US, with a team of over 500 professionals.

Our expertise lies in Cyber Security, Internet of Things (IOT), Digital Healthcare, Networking and ANKIOS, a single platform exclusively dedicated to next-gen digital transformation - Blockchain, Intelligent Automation, Big Data & Analytics and Cloud Computing technologies.
Inspira is ratified with an ISO and CMMI Level 3 certification. Over the last decade, we have supported our clients in maximizing their business performance with domain expertise, innovative project management and comprehensive, full spectrum services.
We partner with Fortinet, and our business is growing almost by 50% year on year. Fortinet’s clear vision of the needs of both today’s and tomorrow’s networks has enabled us to continually be at the forefront of delivering capabilities that align with the current and future needs of our customers.

How is the security market progressing and what are the business challenges from an SI perspective?
The challenge here is that most legacy security devices in place operate in isolation. Sure, they can generate copious log files, and may have elaborate reporting capabilities, but they don’t easily share or correlate their data with other security devices. If your NGFW doesn’t talk to your WAF or your Secure Email Gateway, you may be missing critical insights that only exist between those tools. Instead, most organizations end up hand correlating log files and reports between different tools, which mean that subtle details that may indicate a risk or a breach can be easily overlooked.
Fortinet Security Fabric via Fabric APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) enables collaboration by actively collecting and sharing threat and mitigation information to improve threat intelligence, enhance overall threat awareness, and broaden threat response from end to end.

What measures are you taking to meet these challenges? How has Fortinet helped you in the market?
We provide a plug and play ecosystem that will constantly help monitor the potential threats proactively and provide appropriate measures and guidance to mitigate the same.
Fortinet’s Security Fabric gets products to work together. The Fabric-Ready partner program allows other vendor’s products to connect to the Fortinet Security Fabric and we can very richly collaborate in their defenses.

What are the business opportunities in securing Hybrid Cloud, Applications, IoT, SD-Branch, SIEM, Access Control, WAF and NGFW?
There is a huge transformation across all sectors with large scale adoption of hybrid cloud. Customers are looking at an integrated security solution framework approach. There are multiple opportunities in security customer’s cloud instances.

There are clear opportunities for -
•    Secured Monitoring of IoT and Scada Solutions is a business priority as we move towards integration of IT and OT. The ability to monitor any physical entity and perform advanced data mining and analytics on the resulting data is creating opportunities and efficiencies in energy, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and many other industries with analytical engines hosted in cloud.
•    The increase in usage of business-critical, cloud-based applications and tools hence there is a need for SD-WAN to improve performance with integrated security architectures.
•    SIEM is the domain where there are drastic enhancements is happening with UEBA, NBA, Forensics and threat analytics functions. These functional needs are being fulfilled by additional solutions or current SIEM solutions are enhancing their functionalities
•    Access Control: The growth of Internet of Things (IoT) & BYOD devices has made it necessary to have visibility into devices attaching the networks. There is a gaping hole for the security teams to be aware of every device and every user accessing the networks. New age solutions should provide visibility and control on the devices connecting to the network and ensure that minimum security controls are complied.

Please share details of any Customer wins and deployments for Fortinet along with how it has benefited the customer in overcoming security challenges?  
In India’s largest bank, we have worked with Fortinet to help customer protect its Internet gateway. The customer has one of the largest Captive Data Center in India with a project internet gateway of more than 100 Gigs plus. Fortinet’s FortiGate Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) solution was selected based on its performance architecture and Fortinet Security Fabric abilities to bring together multiple security technologies to deliver comprehensive and collaborative security capabilities across the whole network.

With FortiGate Next Generation Firewall (NGFW), we are able to deliver a great user experience while achieving transparent visibility and inspection of all encrypted traffic on-premises and in the cloud. It also helps reduce latency, while the significantly higher throughput has helped the bank turn on multiple security technologies like Intrusion Prevention, Intrusion Detection, Web Filtering, Content Filtering, Applicational Control, Device Identification and Management without compromising User and Customer experience. The bank’s branches are now securely connected to the main datacenter through an SSL VPN connection enabling users to access applications while deploying centralized user policies and control.

Thanks to Fortinet Security Fabric scalability, the bank can continue to grow its business and expand operations in its network.