Fortinet, a pioneer and provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions, has announced that global market research firm Frost & Sullivan has bestowed on the company the “Global Competitive Strategy Leadership of the Year” best practices award for enabling profitable network-based Managed Security Services.
The award is based on extensive research conducted by Stratecast, a Frost & Sullivan subsidiary, which evaluated Fortinet against several UTM vendors. This award validates the strength of Fortinet’s security platform as more than 500 service providers around the globe have adopted the FortiGate multi-threat security appliance as the foundation for their managed security services.
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognise companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis and extensive secondary research in order to identify best practices in the industry.
In recognising Fortinet for this award, Frost & Sullivan highlighted the following contributors:
• Fortinet has demonstrated the means and the results to its Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) customers to be a trusted and capable security partner
• In addition to Fortinet’s technology prowess and security pedigree, the company has concentrated on building features that position FortiGate, Fortinet’s flagship new generation security gateway, as out-of-box ready for managed service deployments
• Fortinet has the technical expertise in each security function it supports -firewall, IPS, VPN, antivirus, Web content filtering, anti-spam, traffic shaping – and the operational mindset to move network-based managed security services from a strategic initiative to a profitable business for its MSSP partners
The selection of Fortinet for this award was based on Stratecast’s continuous research of technologies, products and services designed to improve the security of enterprise networks, their business and consumer-facing applications, and sensitive data at rest, in use and in motion.
“Telecommunications providers are driving hard toward expanded relationships with their business customers and managed security services is an area where telecommunication providers are confident that they can succeed,” says Michael Suby, director of Stratecast, a division of Frost & Sullivan. “However, success is predicated on developing the right partnerships to bring appealing and profitable services to market and in supporting customers. Fortinet has proven that it has what it takes to be an enabling partner in managed security services.”
Fortinet’s Booming Global MSSP Adoption
Leading MSSPs such as Verizon Business, Orange Business Services, NTT Communications, Chunghwa Telecom and Belgacom have chosen Fortinet solutions as the basis for providing an array of managed services to address the security needs of their customers while saving on both capital and operational expenses. With Fortinet’s flexible, fast FortiGate security platform, MSSPs benefit from multi-layer security, ASIC-accelerated performance and modular scalability — enabling them to optimise their deployment and management costs.
Fortinet integrates a broad array of network and content security applications and services onto its flexible, high-performance FortiGate platform ideally suited for MSSPs, carriers and enterprises. Through the utilisation of virtual domains (VDOMs), FortiGate systems offer MSSPs exceptional manageability of multiple domains and networks from a single device with domain-specific administrative profiles; scalability for providing the performance to support thousands of virtual networks without impacting overall network throughput, specific users or applications; and the modularity that can only be achieved with a broad security suite.
“Global MSSP adoption of Fortinet’s solutions has led to our increased foothold in this sector, which currently represents one of the fastest-growing segments of our overall business,” said Ken Xie, founder, president and CEO of Fortinet. “We are very pleased to receive this distinction from Frost & Sullivan as it demonstrates the success and satisfaction we are seeing from our MSSP customers.”
FortiGate systems deliver real-time network protection through the integration of essential security applications and services – including firewall, antivirus, VPN, IPS, anti-spam, Web content filtering and traffic shaping – that can be deployed individually, or combined as a UTM solution. All FortiGate systems are kept up-to-date automatically by Fortinet’s FortiGuard Network, which provides broad updates that help provide protection against the most damaging threats commonly found in email and Web traffic such as viruses, worms, vulnerability exploit attempts and other unwanted network traffic – around the clock and around the world.
Fortinet’s FortiManager is a centralised management platform that allows MSSPs to deploy security services to thousands of customers and eases the administrative efforts required to deploy, configure, monitor and maintain a full range of network protection services. FortiAnalyzer provides advanced security management functions such as quarantine archiving, event correlation, vulnerability assessments, traffic analysis and content archiving.
