Fortinet Hits the Road with IDC and VMware to Help Enterprises with Agile Cloud Security


Fortinet, VMware, and International Data Corporation (IDC) are hitting the road with the Agile Cloud Security series of events across EMEA, with the aim of increasing awareness of the security challenges digital transformation and cloud present, along with the solutions available to address these challenges.  From February to June, this road show will visit seven countries across the Middle East, Europe, and Africa.

As part of this road show, Fortinet will be discussing the security challenges faced by enterprises adopting cloud technologies and services, and integrating them together in what has become a multi-dimensional cloud environment. We will also be looking Fortinet’s approach and solutions designed to help customers secure these environments.

Here is an excerpt from that Fortinet presentation, Securing Your Multi-Dimensional Cloud:

In order to successfully think, design, and implement security as an enabler for the enterprise’s digital transformation, it is important to understand the multi-dimensional cloud environment that now exists. It all starts with software.

Software is redefining the way businesses do business

Today, software is making a huge impact on every phase of business and every type of interaction, whether internal or external. It is the engine driving digital transformation. To be agile, competitive, and innovative, enterprises are relying more and more on software for every aspect of their business.

Software has been around for a while, but digital transformation is relatively new.

So what has changed? Only recently, enterprises have adopted and implemented core technologies and services that enable them to fully harness the power of software and applications. These are known as cloud technologies and services, empowered by automation provided via software-defined technologies, such as software-defined compute, storage, and networking. These software-defined technologies enable applications to deliver new services, reshape interactions, drive innovation, agility and go-to-market, while reducing overall cost via automation.

Cloud is the enabler of software-defined IT. But when we talk about digital transformation and utilizing the cloud, we cannot afford to overlook new security concerns this new environment introduces. To be effective, security must become as software- and cloud-defined as the network it needs to protect.

How businesses became multi-dimensional

Most modern enterprise networks were designed around hardware-based computing, storage, and networking. But with the software-defined revolution, organizations have begun to implement cloud technologies on top of this hardware infrastructure – creating private clouds over which they have full control and management, as well as rapidly adopting public cloud environments where control and management is shared with a cloud service provider.

There are many types of public cloud services, with the primary categories including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Increasingly, enterprises are adopting a hybrid cloud environment where, on top of their private cloud, they have deployed applications and data across multiple IaaS/PaaS/SaaS public clouds – creating a multi-dimensional cloud ecosystem.

In this environment, applications and data are extremely flexible, dynamic, and agile, resources can be consumed by different cloud-based solutions and applications, and data is often shared and migrated between these clouds. Securing those environments, and the data traveling through them, is both challenging and paramount.  

Security challenges in a multi-dimensional environment

There are several security traps and challenges that these complex and agile environments present, such as: How do I secure different public cloud environments? Where does security responsibility lie in such a multi-dimensional environment? How does cloud security relate to my overall security strategy and posture? How do I integrate security in and between these highly dynamic, software-defined environments?

So, how do you do all of that? How do you build the optimal security architecture for this multi-dimensional enterprise? For the answers, come see Fortinet and VMware at the IDC Agile Cloud Security event near you.