Securing Hybrid Data Centers and Preventing Ransomware

As more organizations reopen their offices to employees, many are still offering remote work as an option, with a new ‘work from anywhere’ model becoming the reality for the foreseeable future. The nature of flexibility in this work model leaves organizations with a new dilemma: how can they secure employees, regardless of location, and still protect their data and critical infrastructures while also achieving high performance?

The ‘work from anywhere’ model has been a greater catalyst for organizations to adopt hybrid data centers. With hybrid data centers, organizations are deploying resources across multiple clouds and keeping other business critical applications and data in on-premises data centers for compliance and control. While this helps achieve operational efficiency, as the data center infrastructure is more distributed and as the attack surface continues to evolve and reveal more security blind spots, distributed networks reduce visibility and increase the risk of breaches or attacks.

Growing Demand for Advanced Security and High Performance

To meet the demands of the changing landscape, organizations need new methods of protection on a larger scale. Organizations need to inspect encrypted flows to detect all type of attacks, especially malware that hides in secure channels, to prevent ransomware and the disruption of command and control attacks from stealing customer and corporate data.

Additionally, organizations need to develop a method of managing excessive implicit trust and provide inspection into the growing volume of encrypted traffic, which is increasingly used by cyber adversaries to mask malicious traffic. Otherwise, securing growth and accelerating digital transformation will be very difficult for organizations as they try to meet growing business demands.

Securing Hybrid Data Centers with ZTNA and Ransomware Protection Capabilities

Fortinet’s latest Next-Generation Firewall, the FortiGate 3500F, helps organizations by ensuring business continuity and advanced security for hybrid data centers through its security-driven networking approach. FortiGate 3500F NGFW secures the data center edge, core and interconnect by providing ultra-fast secure data center to data center paths to build disaster recovery sites, all powered by the industry’s highest Security Compute Rating (SCR) of 6x IPsec. It also enables organizations to secure data center to cloud paths for cloud on-ramps with full compliance and controls. Other key highlights of the FortiGate 3500F include:

• FortiGuard Security Services and Fortinet ASIC SPUs enable hyperscale protection for ransomware and advanced threats: FortiGate 3500F is powered by Fortinet’s purpose-built ASIC Security Processing Units (SPUs), like the NP7 and CP9. FortiGate 3500F offers the highest security compute rating of 6x over the industry average for performance – including support of TLS1.3 – to detect attacks, like ZEUS, Trickbot, Dridex, and protect organizations from network, application and file-based attacks and many other sophisticated threats. FortiGate 3500F also leverages advanced AI and machine learning delivered by FortiGuard Security Services. These further help organizations protect themselves against network anti-virus, mail security, anti-DDoS, and similar functions, like IPS and anti-malware solutions.

• Natively integrates access proxy capabilities, such as zero trust network access (ZTNA): FortiGate 3500F is the only NGFW in the industry that natively integrates access proxy capabilities to enable zero trust network access (ZTNA). This allows organizations to host applications anywhere with consistent policy controls to enable and secure hybrid workforce models with seamless and superior user experience.

• Seamless user experience through consolidation: Fortinet further delivers a security-driven networking approach with FortiGate 3500F, which combines security and networking capabilities, including Secure SD-WAN and zero trust network access. An industry first, only Fortinet offers Secure SD-WAN, SD-Branch and ZTNA in one single offering.

• Scaling Business with Superior Performance and Advanced Security: Powered by Fortinet’s ASIC SPUs, FortiGate 3500F offers some of the highest performance numbers for NGFW with 12x higher speeds than leading competitors. As a result, FortiGate 3500F delivers unparalleled performance levels and hyperscale to inspect, segment and secure locally hosted data and workloads at network speeds. Organizations are able to host business critical applications and provide secure access to corporate users, customers and partners.

Achieve Security-Driven Networking with the Industry’s Best-in-Class NGFW

As the threat landscape grows, it is critical to support business growth and digital transformation to remain innovative and ahead of cyber adversaries. ‘Work from anywhere’ will likely be the new normal for many workplaces, something cybercriminals are no doubt planning for, and organizations must find new ways to improve network security and manage growing encryption traffic to support this work model. Organizations can benefit from Fortinet’s FortiGate 3500F security-driven networking approach to secure hybrid data centers with ZTNA and ransomware protection capabilities while ensuring high performance isn’t jeopardized.

Find out how the Fortinet Security Fabric platform delivers broad, integrated, and automated protection across an organization’s entire digital attack surface to deliver consistent security across all networks, endpoints, and clouds.