Fortinet VIP Forum outlines key strategies to secure enterprises in Sri Lanka

Conference in Moscow underlines comprehensive security fabric is critical to strengthening security posture

Fortinet, the global leader in high-performance cybersecurity solutions, recently conducted its annual Security Conference for CIOs in Moscow, Russia. At the conference attended by over 100 CIOs from SAARC, Fortinet emphasised that the best way to secure complicated networked environments was simplicity and recommended the implementation of Segmentation, Universal Policy and Collaborative Intelligence as three important strategies for securing evolving environments.

Presenting at the conference, Joe Sarno, Vice President, International Emerging, MEA, Eastern Europe, India and SAARC, Fortinet said: “Data centres are evolving along with customer demands for fast and secure cloud infrastructure and services. The growth of IoT devices and traffic represents both an opportunity and a threat to today’s digital businesses. Having a comprehensive security strategy, including a single pane-of-glass view of security management and policy across IoT to Cloud, is essential in establishing a consistent security posture for an organisation.”

Fortinet has outlined three key strategies to help organisations in Sri Lanka protect their businesses:

Segmentation – Networks need to be intelligently segmented into functional security zones. End to end segmentation, from IoT to the cloud, and across physical and virtual environments, provides deep visibility into traffic that moves laterally across the distributed network, limits the spread of malware, and allows for the identification and quarantining of infected devices. 

Collaborative intelligence – Local and global threat intelligence needs to be shared between security devices, and a coordinated response between devices needs to be orchestrated centrally. 

Universal policy – A centralised security policy engine that determines trust levels between network segments, collects real time threat information, establishes a unified security policy, and distributes appropriate orchestrated policy enforcement.

This is why Fortinet has introduced its new Security Fabric architecture. This architecture is designed to integrate security technologies for the endpoint, access layer, network, applications, data centre, content, and cloud into a single collaborative security solution that can be orchestrated through a single management interface.

Union Assurance PLC Sri Lanka Manager IT Infrastructure and Operations Ranil Silva said: “With increasing business dependence on technology, security issues too are on the rise. As our networks become more complicated, the tendency is to add new security devices to an already overburdened network. The Fortinet VIP Forum, through its knowledge gaining session, has emphasised that complexity is the enemy of security. Siloed security solutions with separate management interfaces and no meaningful way to gather or share threat information with other devices on your network are only marginally useful.”

Sri Lanka Telecom Engineer ISP Network Operation N. Senthilruban said: “Businesses of all sizes look towards managed services to be lean and scalable. As a leading data center service provider, our customers demand high performance and an agile environment without security becoming a traffic chokepoint. The sessions and interactions with security experts at the VIP Forum has revealed that service providers can execute thier cloud stratergies without performance barriers, and also address customers’ concerns about data security and privacy with the confidence that their data is protected within the Fortinet Security Fabric.”

Fortinet security experts also highlighted that the region is tipped to be at the forefront of IoT growth, with market researcher IDC estimating that Asia-Pacific’s industries will connect 8.6 billion things by 2019.