Fortinet Launches A New Line of Firewall, and its Features are Super Impressive

Fortinet has always been a forerunner in the field of network and cloud security. Their flagship product line started with FortGate (year 2002), an anti-spam and anti-virus firewall. Since then, Fortinet has continued to make great strides in the field of security, coming up with durable, reliable products that captured the market. And not much later than the new year started, they released a new product line that shows much promise.

Fortinet’s Latest Offering: The FortiGate 1800F Next-Generation Firewall

This NP7 Network Processor powered firewall is a sophisticated next-gen technology that has the capability to boost security operations. With data as a whole in a constant state of inflation, security-inclined organizations are concerned about the huge influx of data and the scalability of their security mechanisms. The FortiGate 1800F is designed bespoke for this growing concern. It has the power to address hyperscale data processing unit and match up to the sophistication of modern, newly emerging threats. Among other things, it is stringent about enforcing standard security policies.

According to John Maddison, Executive VP of products and CMO at Fortinet, the team behind FortiGate 1800F developed the NP7 processor specially to support the feature set of the firewall. It has such power that it can easily handle industry hotcake technologies like IoT, mobile computing and cloud deployment models.

“NP7 will help us build out hyperscale protection going forward,” says John Maddison. “Think of it as a complete firewall on a chip.”

Building this customised processor chipset equipped with a strong modernised processing power allows the NP7 processor to circumvent infrastructural bottleneck. This is how Fortinet aims to handle the distributed nature of all the modern technologies mentioned above. This reduces single points of failure and introduces a much-needed redundancy i.e. even if one deployment site fails, the application performance and security does not take a hit.

Money-wise speaking, the FortiGate 1800F is prophesized to bring in tremendous amount of profits and market shares.

“We are focused on continuing to gain market share by investing in network security, the build out of our Security Fabric platform, and innovations in the areas of 5G, IoT, edge and cloud security.” – Ken Xie, CEO

The feature-set of FortiGate 1800F:

• The highest SSL inspection performance with a Security Compute Rating of 20x and support for the latest TLS 1.3 standard.
• Hardware accelerated virtual extension local area network, or VXLAN. The idea here is that VXLAN enables fast communication between scaled services co-hosted on virtual and physical platforms.
• The ability to secure artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads as well as large datasets.

But Fortinet didn’t stop there. Accompanying the release of the firewall line, Fortinet also launched FortiOS 6.4, a security fabric that automates workflows across infrastructure and attack vectors. The platform gets north of 350 new features, including an SD-WAN orchestrator, application optimization, segmentation visibility, zero-trust network access, improved profiling of devices, AI-driven security operations and support for Amazon’s AWS Outposts and Google Cloud Anthos.

To make sure these updates and additions to their hardware arsenal don’t hamper the partnering companies, they’ve ensured uniformity across all their APIs and OS layers.

In addition, the company launched FortiGuard Labs via the Fortinet 360 Protection Bundle, which includes operational, support and security services as well as its platform.