During VMworld we ad the chance of meeting Jason Bandouveres, Director and Product Management for Fortinet’s virtualized solutions.

What do you think about the presence of Fortinet here at WMworld and the position of your company with regards to the evolutions of the threats for security?

Fortinet is a company with 15 years of experience in the network and system protection field, and it’s ready to face all the novelties that the Software Defined systems are bringing. Fortigate, out most known and used product, is one of the most complete UTM (Unified Threat Management) and has some fundamental features, like an Operative System that has been developed internally and profoundly optimized (FortiOS), an internally developed antivirus engine and a system dedicated to the protection against 0-day threats.

 

Fortigate is well known as an hardware appliance too..

Surely we have hardware appliances of any price and dimension that can fulfil the needs of every company. But we are ready for Software Defined Datacenter too, with two different appliances: one for traditional infrastructures (FortiGate-VM) and one for the environments where the network is virtualized as well (FortiGate-VMX). The latter perfectly integrates with VMware NSX offering a complete and advanced protection level.
Naturally these appliances have all the advantages of hardware-based solutions, starting with our dedicated Operative System: FortiOS.
The integration with virtual platforms has been thought going beyond VMware, so we offer support to Cisco ACI, HP Helion Openstack, Openstack/KWM Neutron, Amazon Web Services/Xen and Microsoft Azure/Hyper-V.

Everybody remembers of us because of Fortigate, but we have other products that can satisfy different needs, like FortiWeb, our Web-apps dedicated Firewall, FortiDDoS, DDoS attacks protection, and FortiMail, spam and other threats email protection. We even have dedicated hardware for the protection of devices that are getting more and more widespread, and therefore at risk, such as wireless Access Points: security is included directly in the hardware devices, offering and even major protection.

Are your products suited for multitenant architectures, like the ones of the Cloud Providers?

Surely, in particular Fortigate has been including for years the idea of Virtual Domains, a feature that can virtually separate the firewall in two or more domains, thus creating separated units capable of individually managing two or more clients without having to set complex rules and configurations in a single dashboard.