Cloud security is often viewed as a hindrance to productivity and agility, slowing down the ability to develop new applications and processes. However, when adopting a new cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), you must balance adequate cloud security with the cloud’s elasticity and scalability.

Fortinet Security Fabric provides the ideal components to build an autonomous services hub for AWS designed for various business needs. By concentrating on your cloud security services, your enterprise can protect its data and assets while ensuring consistent security policies across the entire infrastructure.

The Fortinet Security Fabric provides AWS cloud users with various security capabilities from a central location, leveraging a cloud-native ability to automatically scale and replicate services in other regions. Here are six ways can provide a balanced and secure cloud environment.

Fortinet For Your AWS Cloud Environment

1. Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) access control. With the FortiGate NGFW, you control who can access your enterprise’s data and what they are able to view. With a cloud services hub, restrictions can be based on cloud resource tags, IP addresses, TCP services, and application control policies for outgoing and incoming traffic.
2. VPN cloud connectivity. Secure the data your enterprise shares across resources with the cloud services hub. The cloud services hub can also use FortiGate NGFWs to establish and maintain secure VPN cloud connectivity from branch offices, other data centers, office locations, remote users, or even from organizational VPCs residing in the cloud. This ensures that all traffic is transmitted confidentially over shared resources.
3. Secure web gateway. With FortiGate you also have the ability to secure web gateways and reduce the risk of malicious communications. By using it as the exit point to the internet, the cloud services hub enforces acceptable internet usage policies for your employees while also reducing suspicious communications.
4. Web application security. Protect users’ personal details such as electronic payments or health information with FortiWeb web application firewall (WAF) as part of your cloud services hub.

Used as the entry point for internet traffic accessing web-based applications, a central set of WAF security policies protects business-critical applications while ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, such as the (PCI DSS) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

5. Email security. With Fortinet’s FortiMail deployed on demand, you can have peace of mind that you have a backup and secure email gateway (SEG) for your enterprise. FortiMail provides security and flexibility for global email deployments without having to worry about availability.
6. Sandboxing. Protecting cloud environments from zero-day attacks is growing increasingly important for enterprises. FortiSandbox can integrate with FortiGate to scan any in-line traffic as part of the cloud services hub. It can help protect applications by leveraging the FortiSandbox JSON API. FortiSandbox also has the capability to scale to Amazon S3 cloud storage buckets, via lambda functions. With the available collaboration tools and the increasing use of public file and image repositories, the ability to safely test suspicious code and expose new threats is more relevant than ever.

Using the Fortinet Security Fabric for your enterprise’s AWS cloud environment provides you with a balanced solution that combines cloud security with the ability to remain flexible and scale to organizational needs.

Contact WEI today if you’re ready to deploy Fortinet for your AWS cloud environment. Our experts will help you determine which services your enterprise needs to maximize cloud security and agility.

Next Steps: Learn more about Fortinet cloud security options by downloading our latest tech brief, “.”

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VMware NSX SD-WAN with VeloCloud

VMware CEO, , compares the current vibe about their SD-WAN solution to that of the early days of virtualization when VMware changed how servers are managed and deployed with its ESXI virtual technology. He describes its VeloCloud product as, “the hottest element of the company’s product portfolio.” Gelsinger added, “VeloCloud is quickly becoming a key element of VMware’s edge strategy.”

VeloCloud is incorporated into VMware’s -SD-WAN. The premise behind the product is simple – bring the same level of agility and flexibility to branch offices in order to deploy, manage, and secure application traffic remotely using a transport independent architecture. VMware accomplishes by substituting rigid inflexible network hardware for the nimbleness and flexibility of software. By separating the control plane and data plane layers, intelligence is moved from the data plane to the programmable control plane, substituting labor intensive tasks with automated policies. Some of the specific abilities of VeloCloud include:

• Increase bandwidth economically by aggregating WAN circuits of any type, while at the same time, providing faster application response
• Deploy a branch in minutes with NSX SD-WAN Edge activation from the cloud
• Enable direct cloud access for all users
• Provide standard based encryption to secure connectivity over any type of transport
• Compact multiple virtualized network functions to eliminate single-function appliances and reduce branch IT complexity.

With VeloCloud, VMware is developing a framework that extends its hybrid and multi-cloud environments to the edge for both applications and IoT devices alike. The result is a branch architecture that is agile, automated, and secure.

Cisco Viptela

Cisco has been a leader in WAN infrastructure technology for decades and their SD-WAN product is one of the most widely deployed enterprise solutions of its kind. With Cisco SD-WAN, the company sets out to ensure that every organization can become an “always connected workplace” whether work takes place at corporate headquarters, or district offices thousands of miles away. With deployment cycles growing every shorter and growing branch complexity throughout the network enterprise, Cisco identified the need to create to create a carrier agnostic overlay for any WAN, centralized management and increased visibility and versatility. Formerly , Cisco acquired this leading software defined technology to serve as a natural extension of their dominant product line. By software defining their branch network gateways, companies can reduce their WAN costs as much as 50%.

There are three main facets to Cisco’s software defined WAN solutions.

• Segmentation – Cisco SD-WAN takes the concept of the traditional VLAN even further to provide end-to-end segmentation that is policy driven in order to ensure that WAN traffic is protected.

• Zero-touch provisioning – Cisco SD-WAN gives central IT the ability to perform centralized control deployments and upgrades in order to scale out deployments fast enough to react to changing dynamics.

• Cloud Integration – If everyone is turning to the cloud for its many benefits, then it only makes sense to bring the power of the cloud to the WAN as well. Cisco SD-WAN is cloud based and integrates a cloud first philosophy directly into your WAN infrastructure that simplifies security and improves application performance.

Fortinet and SD-WAN

According to Gartner, 90 percent of SD-WAN vendors are not traditional security vendors and thus there are serious gaps within many of their solutions. Fortinet now integrates their Next Generation Firewall solutions with SD-WAN capabilities. The result is increased scalability, greater flexibility, improved simplicity, and cost savings. All of this without any compromise to security.

erases geographic boundaries, forming a mess like network that connects network and security paths to all of your locations across the world using multiple types of connectivity links that create a borderless infrastructure. It also does away with the need for multiple network devices residing at each branch gateway as all security, routing and management functions are conducted within a single appliance.

When it comes to security, Fortinet offers the full gamut of tools including application control, web filtering, antivirus, intrusion detection and advanced threat detection. Perhaps this is why Fortinet is the only vendor with security capabilities to receive the SD-WAN recommended rating in the First NSS Labs Software-Defined WAN Test Report. Because cost savings is a primary motivation for companies to explore SD-WAN opportunities, FortiGate SD-WAN shows that you can have your cake and eat it too.

Aruba Branch

Aruba is the same company that improved the visibility, security, and management capabilities of your wireless network and now wants to apply those same standards of visibility, control, simplicity, and security to the WAN. In the same way that their enterprise wireless platform solutions can control and react to your highly dynamic wireless environments, Aruba’s SD-WAN solution uses contextual data and awareness to dynamically route traffic across the WAN based on user, device, or group affiliation. Whether it is data, video, voice, or IoT, Aruba can protect and optimize all of your traffic patterns, LAN and WAN alike. Traffic segmentation, isolation and path selection are enforced for not just the last mile of connectivity, but the entire route from device to WAN exit point.

Like the previous vendors, Aruba’s solution is centered around software defined architecture that combines multiple virtual network functions into their SD-Branch appliance. Aruba’s branch gateway appliance connects to all WAN uplinks and provides an SD-WAN overlay fabric that makes application management and deployment a snap. Gateway functions include stateful firewall capabilities, IPsec encryption, VPN, QoS and WAN path monitoring. SD-Branch integrates with Aruba Central that provides single pane of glass visibility and manageability for all of your locations. But integration isn’t just about Aruba. The company’s security partner program has more than 140 technology partners, all of whom provide added functionality and innovation to an already powerful and proven platform.

Conclusion

Every mile of connectivity for your application traffic is important. The last mile is no less important than the first. Each of these vendors have proven solutions to optimize and secure the total connectivity arteries of your WAN. Each of these solutions brings agility and security to any WAN environment, making your WAN, a fully controlled and optimal environment. Talking to a trusted technology partner like WEI can help you see which SD-WAN strategy would be the best fit for your organization.

Next Steps: Sign up for a hat covers RF coverage maps, RF analysis, capacity plans, channel plans, access point installation recommendations, and more!

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With the rise of digital transformation in today’s modern workplace, traditional Wide Area Network solutions are unable to keep up with enterprise demands. A growing number of organizations are moving their data and applications to a cloud environment, which means they are increasing their bandwidth use – resulting in network congestion and rising costs, as well as growing security concerns. It is for these reasons SD-WAN (software defined wide area network) is a compelling and attainable alternative; however, most SD-WAN solutions are not as secure as enterprises need them to be, with add-on security offerings that pose a risk by creating a fragmented solution.

Enter Fortinet’s FortiGate SD-WAN. This solution takes on the problematic challenges of a secure SD-WAN deployment and is the only NGFW (next generation firewall) security vendor to receive a “recommended” stamp of approval in NSS Labs’ software-defined wide area network report.

Why FortiGate is the Best Solution for SD-WAN Needs

So far, we’ve briefly touched on the reasons why you should choose an SD-WAN solution and why FortiGate is the best option. Let’s take a closer look at what FortiGate can provide your enterprise.

Fortinet is a global leader in broad, integrated, and solutions and its FortiGate SD-WAN excelled in every category assessed by NSS Labs. According to their press release, they showcase a number of advantages, including:

• Highest quality of experience for VoIP: Two of the most difficult business-critical functions to prevent degradation, voice and video, experienced virtually no loss of quality with FortiGate SD-WAN – including during brownout conditions. Even under tough conditions, such as environments with combinations of jitter, packet loss, and latency, FortiGate SD-WAN delivered high quality of experience (QoE) for enterprise-grade voice and video applications.
• Lowest total cost of ownership (TCO): FortiGate SD-WAN delivers the lowest TCO per Mbps (VPN throughput) among all participating vendors at a ratio of $5@749 Mbps. This is because FortiGate SD-WAN’s custom-built security processors rely on a new generation SOC3 (system-on-a-chip) to accelerate performance.
• Native Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) security: SD-WAN is commonly used by enterprises adopting digital transformation to provide branches with direct internet connectivity and reduce latency while accessing cloud applications. FortiGate SD-WAN with native security blocked 100 percent of evasions and achieved 99.9 percent security effectiveness, proving that the solution can successfully protect branches from advanced attacks. FortiGate SD-WAN is integrated into the Fortinet Security Fabric, providing organizations with a stronger security posture through transparent views of network security, centralized management controls, and threat intelligence sharing.

Organizations around the world are deploying FortiGate SD-WAN as Fortinet delivers both an effective, low-cost SD-WAN solution and the right security to go with it, solidifying FortiGate SD-WAN as a compelling balance of security, performance, and value.

Need more reasons to choose Fortinet as your security solution provider for digital transformation? Fortinet solutions consistently demonstrate superior security effectiveness, advanced features, and superior performance when put to the test. Beyond FortiGate SD-WAN, Fortinet’s commitment to testing and validation has resulted in their solutions earning NSS Labs Recommended ratings across multiple group tests including:

• Breach Prevention Systems
• Breach Detection Systems
• Web Application Firewall
• Advanced Endpoint Protection

With Fortinet, you never have to wonder if their solutions will work together as whole. All of their NSS Labs-recommended solutions are designed to interoperate as part of a holistic security architecture through the Fortinet Security Fabric, producing a powerful, integrated end-to-end security solution across the entire attack surface.

As more companies realize the need to move from the traditional to the digital, Fortinet provides the answers to enterprise security demands in today’s modern environment. Security is one of the most critical areas to an organization and should not be left to just anyone. You can trust in Fortinet’s proven track record and FortiGate’s recommendation from NSS Labs to help protect your most sensitive data. Now is the time to contact WEI to learn how FortiGate SD-WAN can fulfill your enterprise’s specific needs.

NEXT STEPS: Looking for insight on how to “up your security game” to meet the needs of your organization’s digital transformation initiatives? We invite you to check out the Fortinet Solution Guide, Read it today!

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