Fortinet complements Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure with high-performance SDN security

Fortinet, the global leader in high-performance cyber security solutions, yesterday announced the integration of the Fortinet FortiGate firewall solution into the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC). 

APIC is the controller for Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), the industry’s most comprehensive SDN architecture, which dramatically reduces TCO, automates IT tasks and accelerates data centre application deployments. 

The new FortiGate Connector for Cisco ACI is designed with the security needs of software-defined data centres in mind, enabling physical and virtual networks to deploy policy-driven application services across Layer 4-7 fabrics. This integration further extends the Fortinet Software-Defined Network Security (SDNS) Framework, a first of its kind offering designed to provide advanced threat protection through the integration of security into modern, agile data centre environments. 

Fortinet’s leading high-performance cyber security solutions integrated with Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) can help joint Cisco and Fortinet customers to significantly reduce data centre operating costs without compromising on security or performance.

The promise of the modern data centre lies in the business agility that it can facilitate. Traditionally, networking and layer 4-7 application services have required manual configuration and constant management to keep pace with changes in the data centre. Today, organisations can more nimbly provide rapid, cloud-like services to users, customers and partners. They are also able to consolidate infrastructure components and services so that they are automated, driven by business policies and centrally managed for performance.

The new FortiGate Connector for Cisco ACI delivers application-centric security automation to modern data centres. The solution provides automated and pre-defined policy-based security provisioning for next-generation firewall services, enabling transparent security services insertion anywhere in the network fabric with single-pane-of-glass network management for full visibility on security policy enforcement. 

“ACI delivers unique benefits to customers through policy-based automation, greater scalability through a distributed enforcement system, and greater network visibility through the integration of physical and virtual environments,” said Ish Limkakeng, Vice President, Product Management at Cisco. “The FortiGate Connector for Cisco ACI delivers security protection for enterprise applications and workloads, while enabling automation for greater business efficiencies and cost savings.”

“With the shift to agile, software-defined data centres comes increased security concerns for many organisations,” said Rajesh Maurya, Country Manager, India and SAARC at Fortinet. “The data centre is the heart of the network where application workloads are modified, added, changed, or deleted through manual security provisioning-processes prone to human error. FortiGate Connector for Cisco ACI eliminates these cumbersome processes and automates security policies so they can be centrally orchestrated with better traffic visibility and scalability based on application workloads.”