Fortinet Security on the Google Cloud Platform: The Future is Multi-Cloud

Fortinet Cloud Security Now Available Across Top Five Cloud Providers 

We’re excited to announce that our flagship FortiGate virtual machine is now available for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) through the Cloud Launcher marketplace. The FortiGate VM helps Google Cloud customers securely achieve the scale and elasticity of the public cloud with the integrated security, control, and visibility of on-premises infrastructure. This announcement also marks the first time that a single enterprise firewall solution is available across the top 5 cloud providers.

Protecting corporate and consumer data and users is critical, not just for those organizations adopting cloud computing models, but for our increasingly Internet-connected lives. Which is why providing critical firewalling, intrusion prevention, and other Layer 7 threat protection for the users of Google’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and PaaS platforms – one of the top tier public clouds being used by leading enterprises and startups today – is critical.

Google Cloud Platform has been one of the pioneers and innovators in cloud computing, with key innovations such as per-second billing, container services, and machine learning.  All of these serve to enhance the scalability and elasticity of the cloud, and are helping to drive and accelerate digital transformation and digital business initiatives in enterprises large and small.  Also noteworthy is that Google Cloud was one of the fastest-growing public clouds in 2017, in year-over-year percentage terms, increasing their enterprise penetration by 50% compared to 2016. 

As public cloud adoption increases, and organizations gain confidence in migrating workloads and applications to the public cloud, they have begun to aggressively adopt a multi-cloud model for their workloads and infrastructures because they are choosing to use more than one IaaS/PaaS provider. In fact, a recent survey found that enterprises now use an average of 1.8 infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds, while another discovered that companies use an average 16 cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to help run their business. While these organizations often leverage one provider for specific functionality and another for location or cost, often choosing to use the right cloud for the right application, cloud diversification also provides a measure of redundancy, which also helps enterprises meet their business continuity commitments while avoiding cloud vendor lock-in.

Of course, migrating to a multi-cloud model raises additional security concerns for many organizations. Enterprises already grappling with securing their hybrid cloud environments, i.e. both on-premises data centers and public clouds, now have to deal with an expanded digital attack surface that spans across multiple IaaS clouds. Furthermore, they also need to consider their multiple SaaS application providers as part of their multi-cloud model as well, as SaaS is really just another form of public cloud with enterprise data in a hosted and shared multi-tenant environment.

While many cloud providers like Google have a variety of security measures in place, they generally apply to the security of the cloud itself. Subscribers usually bear the responsibility for their activities in the cloud, especially when data and workloads span multiple cloud environments. Which is another reason why this latest Fortinet announcement is an important milestone: it marks the first time that a single enterprise firewall has been made available across all five top public cloud platforms!

Fortinet is proud to be unique in offering the same FortiGate security in the marketplaces of ALL of the top public cloud platforms of choice, including single pane-of-glass management and orchestration through the Fortinet Security Fabric, to consistently protect the entire digital attack surface, including physical, virtual, and multi-cloud environments.

Read the full news release online.

Download our paper on securing dynamic cloud environments.