Fortinet, a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions, today announced that the FortiGate-VM, powered by the Fortinet Security Fabric, is extending its native support of VMware NSX-T Data Center to provide advanced security for East-West traffic. Fortinet will help customers more confidently unify security to extend their virtualized infrastructure across multi-hypervisor environments, public and private clouds. This provides a consistent security posture leveraging a consistent SecOps model. Fortinet fully supports VMware NSX-T by now adding to the existing North-South protection capabilities of the FortiGate-VM for advanced security in VMware NSX-T environments.
John Maddison, EVP of products and chief marketing officer at Fortinet said, “We look forward to tightening our collaboration with Fabric-Ready Partner VMware to make the cloud on-ramp that mutual customers are undertaking as easy as possible. By combining FortiGate-VM functionality with VMware’s NSX-T Data Center, organizations can seamlessly integrate security functionality across multi-hypervisor environments, public clouds and multiple clouds.”
The need for security and high performance
A recent IHS Markit survey commissioned by Fortinet found that 74 percent of executive respondents have moved applications in the cloud back to their private infrastructure with security concerns and performance as the main reasons why. Security professionals are looking to increase visibility into and performance of their organizations’ applications and services in a hybrid environment without compromising their ability to protect and manage risks.
Fortinet and VMware enable end-to-end security and management across dynamic cloud infrastructures
Today’s announcement addresses this need as Fortinet’s full support of VMware NSX-T allows organizations to reduce the number of point products they use to protect their infrastructure while providing consistent security across various environments. Powered by FortiGate-VM technology, Fortinet’s ability to monitor NSX-T East-West security will provide consistent security across any environment as well as give comprehensive visibility inside the network with single-pane-of-glass management.
Other benefits of Fortinet’s extended support of VMware NSX-T include:
- FortiGate-VM for NSX-T virtual cloud network enables zero trust security across hypervisors and clouds. This allows organizations to mitigate lateral movement of sophisticated threats and vulnerabilities within virtualized data centers and across multiple clouds, providing advanced security throughout all environments
- By leveraging the high speed and unique performance of FortiGate-VM vSPU technology, organizations can scale up to LAN speeds in a virtual form factor. Organizations can also realize the benefits of East-West NGFW traffic inspection and visibility without compromising application performance and infrastructure agility.
- Fortinet’s Fabric Connector automatically updates security policies associated with dynamic objects in NSX-T whenever changes are made to application meta data and annotations. This capability, which also extends to public cloud infrastructures such as AWS, Azure and GCP, relieves organizations from the need to continuously update security policies for every change to the application infrastructure. This eliminates any manual intervention from IT teams, freeing up their time for other business critical duties.
- Simplified management is achieved with Fortinet’s most recent integration enhancements, security can be managed by the NSX-T UI and will automatically be carried through to the FortiGate-VM instances running in the NSX-T Data Center.
As a Fabric-Ready Partner, VMware is enabling Fortinet to natively support its products and solutions. Fortinet’s Fabric-Ready Partner ecosystem’s open APIs approach enables security to be automated and synchronized across DevOps environments. The Fabric Connectors allow deep integration into partner technologies and streamline application lifecycle management while also reducing operational overhead. With this integration Fortinet continues to support customer business priorities related to cloud adoption.
Nikhil Kelshikar, VP of NSX product management, VMware said, “VMware and Fortinet are enabling our mutual customers with end-to-end security by inserting next-generation firewall capabilities seamlessly into VMware NSX-T Data Center environments. FortiGate-VM’s interoperability with NSX-T Data Center will enable our mutual customers to deliver even deeper security across the Virtual Cloud Network.”
