Many of us in IT and Cybersecurity have acknowledged that we may be in the middle of the most tenuous cybersecurity climate in recent history. Cyber threats are becoming a day-to-day struggle for businesses, and the trends are not improving. Many businesses are still struggling to address pandemic-related fallout. Meanwhile, cyber-attacks have been relentlessly destructive in a climate that was dire to begin with. What we are living through is a “perfect storm” on which bad actors are all too happy to capitalize. The pandemic has forced many companies to rapidly ramp up remote workforces, often before they were prepared to do so, creating additional inroads for attackers to exploit. The disastrous combination of increased vulnerabilities and eager cybercriminals seem to play out week after week. The recent the SolarWinds supply chain and Chinese state-sponsored HAFNIUM APT attacks are likely not the end. In fact, if trends continue we may see a string of attacks, one after the other, chipping away at US commerce. More than ever, businesses need to take proactive steps to protect themselves. Yet, recent research suggests most companies still have unprotected data and less than ideal cybersecurity practices in place, making them especially vulnerable to data loss and negative financial impact. Since lack of time to manage multiple security tools is one of the biggest hurdles for IT teams in 2021, I propose simplifying your approach by moving to integrated tool stacks that give you fewer dashboards and greater visibility. Fortinet offers one such stack.
What Can Be Done
Unprecedented as the situation is, there are technologies uniquely suited to meet the needs of larger organizations and address the very problems plaguing IT teams across the US right now. Selecting the right technology, ensuring it is designed to handle high-capacity situations, can help make security controls easier to implement across sprawling environments, like midmarket and small enterprise. After last year’s remote deployments, and in light of ongoing attack increases, this is a good time to reevaluate the technologies you may have in place and make sure you are as secure as you possibly can be. If this describes your organization, you might look at Fortinet as a tried-and-true option to help you adapt to these changes and mitigate the risk that accompanies them. Its single pane of glass management is ideal for helping you centralize operational tasks, and Fortinet technologies all work together cohesively, making your life easier.
Managing Secure Connectivity
A leading provider of next generation firewalls, Fortinet boasts one of the most secure, simple, and easily managed toolsets for facilitating remote workforces of any size. This solves the challenge of enabling your users to remotely access what they need to do their jobs securely and effectively. However, allowing users to access your infrastructure remotely introduces other inherent risks. A compromised endpoint connecting to your secure internal environment through VPN could put your entire network at risk if proper security measures are not in place. This is where Fortinet’s content filtering, as well as the rest of their security fabric comes into play.
Advantages of Using an Integrated Toolset
Fortinet maintains an impressive collection of security tools and safeguards, including vulnerability discovery and management, network content filtering, industry best IPS Firewalls, and much more. The value here is in time and ease of implementation. When you are able to deploy solutions that work together, can be managed together, and create a single “fabric”, you save valuable time that you can then devote to other internal security tasks. The one thing your attackers are betting on is that you are stretched too thin to effectively manage your environment, so the easier you make it on yourself, the more time you can save, the better.
Average Deployment Stack
A typical Fortinet implementation leverages multiple layers of security through the variety of tools offered within the Forti-Fabric:
- Utilizing Fortigate firewalls and secure VPN, users can access resources remotely.
- Fortiguard antivirus ensures the assets connecting to your network remotely are secured and protected, thereby reducing risk to the rest of your network as well.
- The Forticlient endpoint software allows user remote access, device protection, and vulnerability management to be integrated with existing Fortigate infrastructure and centrally managed.
- Through the use of content filtering, you can control access to web content that you consider questionable or dangerous with complete visibility and simplicity, for both remote users as well as those on your local networks.
- Forti-IPS serves as the core of your security infrastructure, protecting against known threats and zero-day attacks including malware and underlying vulnerabilities using an industry-best threat library, deep packet inspection, and maintaining high throughput and low latency.
Validated Security Tool
Between the extensive offering of security safeguards within the Forti-Fabric, and the fact that the company has received more certifications to validate its solutions than any other network security vendor to date, it’s clear that Fortinet’s security toolset is a powerful arsenal, and one that has allowed True Digital Security as a Fortinet partner to enable a growing number of businesses to address the evolving security concerns and challenges of 2020 and 2021 so far.
Our Role as Your Partner
At TRUE, we work with many technologies and evaluate them more in the context of their application than in comparison with one another, making us truly vendor agnostic. With that said, we look for alignment of particular environment types and solution types. Forti-Fabric for the midmarket and enterprise environment is one of those cases. Their solutions are built to meet your unique needs for complexity, functionality, and ease of management. Our engineers are certified to help design a deployment to perfectly meet your needs. If you would like to speak with someone about Fortinet solutions, you can request a consultation anytime. We are here to help.