FortiGate provides customers with a holistic solution

Ramanan Chidambaram, Director – Sales, Fortinet India

As we all know that there is a transition which is happening across the world, one is from the infrastructure as a service and organizations are moving towards as a service model, applications are moving on to the private cloud or the public cloud, the adoption of multiple public clouds is increasing year over year and post COVID we all know that the way people are working remotely and it is going to continue. So the traditional methodology or the approach of network security is no longer going to help organizations to grow their business significantly and for a betterment of productivity. So the current architecture of branches having the products and solutions of having switches, Wi Fi routers, like the firewall, a hub and spoke model of the data center, decentralized Internet security control mechanisms, all those things have to be changed now because the application landscape on the data landscape is changed. It is no longer residing in the data center, it is all distributed across the apps or becoming a lot of SaaS applications coming in place now. From the user perspective it is very simple that everybody’s expectation is to have a very simplified access to the applications and data. From the IT perspective, to have centralized control enrollment and at the same time a tight secure way of getting access to any of the environment to give those flexibility to the users. From the management side, definitely it is to reduce the cost, the total cost of ownership, how we are able to reduce and how it is able to improvise the business side of it for the organization. So, considering all these factors in place, it is important to look at a different way of approach or the way the network security deployment is happening over a period of time. So, as I said, it has four different branches and you may have a lot of different components over there. It is very difficult for IT to implement, manage, and even for the users to pass multiple layers in terms of accessing their applications and data. It is very important for IT to have the analytical and centralized visibility in place.

So considering the way the industry is changing, Fortinet came up with a secure SD WAN concept of having the entire branch in one single solution, a full-fledged SD WAN functionalities, the next generation firewall, advanced routing ZTNA, the entire thing works on one single wire, one single management a single pane of glass. Also, we have incorporated the same 40 wires on the branch switching and the Wi Fi wherein the entire branch control can be centrally managed and that is something which really helps customers in terms of consolidation of multiple branch products. It is just not only consolidation from the technology or from the management perspective, definitely from the cost perspective also it really makes an impact for the customers to have a very good ROI and less TCO as well.

So the FortiGate is the next generation firewall and one of the proven solutions and has great recognition and it continues to lead the next generation firewall. So we have incorporated all the other components to help customers in terms of having a complete holistic solution. The way the market is moving as we said that it is just not only the physical appliance, this entire solution is available as physical appliance and as virtual also. It is also available on the cloud in all the different licensing parameters possible which is beneficial to customers as well.

  Ramanan Chidambaram, Director – Sales, Fortinet India