Rajesh Maurya, Regional Vice President, India & SAARC, Fortinet

"The growing appeal of SD-WAN technologies has caught the attention of the IT world and many are realizing the benefits of efficient cloud adoption, broad application visibility and lowered operating costs. But without the right solution, the speed and agility of SD-WAN can come at the expense of security. To respond to this pervasive industry challenge, Fortinet produced the industry’s first NGFW-centric approach to SD-WAN by tightly integrating SD-WAN functionality into the FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall. This approach produces a compelling solution that combines the increased scalability, flexibility, simplicity and cost savings of SD-WAN with industry-leading security protection.

This focus on secure SD-WAN is clearly resonating with hundreds of customers and partners who are taking advantage of Fortinet’s unique combination of next-generation firewall and SD-WAN in the same offering, managed through a single centralized controller.

Fortinet has also introduced machine learning capabilities to its FortiWeb Web Application Firewall for advanced behavioral threat detection.

With a staggering 48 percent of data breaches being caused by hacking web application vulnerabilities, it’s clear that cybercriminals are increasingly targeting public and internal web applications. Current technologies such as intrusion prevention systems and existing web application security solutions only provide basic protection against these threats. Fortinet has combined our advanced AI-based machine learning capabilities with our FortiWeb WAF to protect web-based applications from attacks targeting known and unknown exploits with near 100 percent threat detection accuracy.

Traditionally, WAFs have relied on application learning (AL) for anomaly and threat detection, but in today’s dynamic threat landscape, AL has proven to have limitations that lead to false positive attack detections and require a significant amount of time to manage for already bogged down security teams.

The newly introduced capabilities in the FortiWeb Web Application Firewall address these issues by introducing machine learning capabilities for better threat detection, faster response times and easier management. Unlike AL, which uses a one-layer approach to detect anomalies based on simply matching inputs to what it has observed and treating every variation as a threat, FortiWeb now uses a two-layer approach of AI-based machine learning and statistical probabilities to detect anomalies and threats separately. The first layer builds the mathematical model for each learned parameter and then triggers anomalies for abnormal requests. The second will then verify if the anomaly is an actual threat or if it is a benign variance (false positive). These new innovations allow FortiWeb to provide nearly 100 percent application threat detection accuracy while requiring virtually no resources to deploy and finetune settings.

Digital transformation is having a significant impact on technology—from data-driven decision-making to cloud adoption, mobility, and the explosion in Internet-of-Things (IoT)—it goes beyond just deploying new solutions. Organizations must also re-examine established business models and processes to drive innovation and better business outcomes.

Digital transformation imperatives has increased­­ the workload of already strained IT teams struggling to keep pace with business needs, security challenges and compliance requirements. The integration of business systems, information technology and operational technology that enables data-driven decision-making also poses new security challenges, because these newly connected systems can also accelerate the speed and damage of attacks across enterprise networks.

It’s no longer sustainable for organizations to forgo digital transformation or security integration as a means to enable the other. Digital transformation and security policies must be planned and deployed in tandem. As their networks become more complex, organizations must adjust their approach to security to ensure there are no gaps in protection. By following security best practices, such as integration and automation, organizations can reduce the security challenges and stress that accompany digital transformation.

Fortinet’s Security Fabric offers the automation and integration solutions that organizations need to connect and monitor their entire network, from endpoint to cloud. The Security Fabric leverages AI and machine learning to automate security processes, allowing security solutions across the network to communicate with each other to administer real-time defenses in the event of an attack. This architectural approach to cybersecurity additionally ensures sustained single-pane of glass visibility through one cohesive dashboard. Furthermore, as more technology is deployed, it can be easily integrated into a single, scalable Security Fabric that incorporates endpoint security, access management, application security, multi-cloud security and more.

Fortinet in India continues to exceed market growth rates, which demonstrate our clear technology advantage and market leadership. Our ability to provide customers with broad, integrated and automated security across the entire network infrastructure sets us apart from our competition. Led by the innovation of the Fortinet Security Fabric, Fortinet had strong market momentum in India and registered a YoY growth of over 26% and is well positioned for robust future growth.

The strength of the Fortinet Security Fabric positions us well to provide industry-leading protection for our customers against the aggressive threats that they face now and in the future, wherever their assets and data are deployed: on-premise or in the cloud.

Our solutions cater to all three segments − SMB, Enterprise and Service Providers, and our customer base in India grew 22% in 2017 with more customers trusting Fortinet to protect their networks.

Market penetration has helped us grow our business in smaller cities, and partners are a core part of our business expansion.  Fortinet is a 100% channel driven company. Our partner base grew from 1200 to 1500 registered partners in India, helping us penetrate markets like Gorakhpur, Ghaziabad, Jammu, Aurangabad, Ajmer and many other smaller cities.

In 2017, Fortinet launched its biggest ever marketing campaign in India to raise awareness of our brand and value propositions to large enterprises and C-level executives. A brand awareness advertisement campaign was run in major financial newspapers and business magazines to increase the brand’s visibility and recall. This effort was well supported by branding campaigns at major airports.

India hosts the second largest R&D center for Fortinet at Bangalore and a DDoS Research facility at Hyderabad. During the year 2017, the team contributed significantly in developing the high-performance hardware logic for DDoS protection including a Domain Reputation Service. The team at the Fortinet Innovation Centre Bangalore developed state-of-the-art algorithms that secure large enterprise Wi-fi networks running mobile and IoT devices and location-based services.

Our consistent growth in the Indian market has necessitated the addition of more headcount to our Sales, Support, Service and Research teams. Our India team strength grew 22% in 2017 and we have also started the process for Nomination to “Great Place to Work” in India, which we won in 2018.

Two years ago, Fortinet announced the Fortinet Security Fabric, our vision for the future of security designed for today’s distributed, scalable and adaptive networks. It was the first security approach designed from the ground up to span the entire network from IoT to multi-clouds as a single, integrated and highly automated security system.

Fortinet has a market-shaping impact on assisting enterprises as they secure their evolving digital infrastructures. The Security Fabric gives us a unique position from which to address all major security markets today, including digital transformation, OT and critical infrastructure, IoT/OT, and the cloud. In fact, we’re the only vendor capable of addressing all of those markets at the same time.

No one organization can deliver holistic security alone, which is why we need channel partners, services providers, technical and Fabric-ready partners, certified Network Security Experts, security academies, government CERTs, third-party testing, threat sharing like CTA, and more, all working in concert to collectively secure us all. And Fortinet and the Fabric are at the heart of all of this.

Our large installed base of customers in India offers us a foundation from which to sell our Fortinet Security Fabric, which is the broadest and most integrated security architecture in the industry. The expanding cloud security market, and the future of securing critical infrastructure (OT) and IoT technologies, will enable Fortinet to continue to grow at multiples of the market over the coming years.

In 2018, it will all be about better aligning our overall sales strategy to the Fortinet Security Fabric. This will help more partners move from a one-time sale relationship with customers to one that creates long-term relationships. We want to help partners look at the lifetime value of their customers and find ways to grow those relationships."