Fortinet delivers SASE and ZTNA capabilities with major updates to its FortiOS

Fortinet announced version 7.0 of FortiOS, Fortinet’s flagship operating system. With over 300 new features, FortiOS 7.0 enhances the Fortinet Security Fabric and Fortinet’s ability to deliver consistent security for all networks, endpoints, and clouds.

John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet

“Most vendors are focused on a single slice of security, but the reality is it’s impossible to keep up with the complexity of today’s threat landscape with that approach. New innovations in FortiOS 7.0 continue Fortinet’s commitment to delivering a cybersecurity platform that expands across the entire digital attack surface to enable security that is broad, integrated, and automated to protect devices, data, and applications.”

FortiOS Powers the Industry’s Highest-Performing Cybersecurity Platform

The explosion of network edges – across data center, WAN, LAN, LTE, off-net, compute, operational technology, CASB, SASE, internet, and most recently the home edge – has expanded and splintered the perimeter across the entire infrastructure. Security that can keep pace with changes to the network and today’s performance requirements while delivering holistic visibility, data, analysis, detection, and timely coordinated response against cyberattacks requires an integrated platform approach.

The Fortinet Security Fabric is the highest-performing cybersecurity platform, powered by FortiOS to enable consistent and flexible security across the entire attack surface. With more consumption models than any other vendor – physical, virtual, cloud, and as-a-Service, across the largest product portfolio – spanning network security and SD-WAN, switching and wireless access, network access control, authentication, public and private cloud security, endpoint security, and AI-driven advanced threat protection solutions – all built on a common operating system, Fortinet empowers organizations of any size to secure and simplify their IT infrastructure.

What’s new in FortiOS 7.0

Major updates in FortiOS 7.0 tackle some of today’s biggest security challenges related to work from home, securing the SASE edge, and more, and expand across the following key areas:

Zero Trust Access

• Zero Trust Network Access for Remote Access and Application Control: FortiOS 7.0 enables every FortiGate customer to employ Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) capabilities out of the box, making Fortinet the only vendor to enable firewall-based ZTNA. ZTNA enabled by FortiOS 7.0 improves user experience by supporting the evolution of better remote access to replace traditional VPN. It also reduces the attack surface by verifying the user and device for every application session, while hiding business-critical applications from the internet. ZTNA from Fortinet further simplifies management by using the same access policy no matter where users are, whether on- or off-network.

Security-Driven Networking

• Consistent Security Everywhere with SASE: Fortinet gives enterprises the flexibility needed to enable their workforce to work from anywhere with consistent, enterprise-grade security delivered on-premises – and now, via cloud-based SASE consumption (Security-as-a-Service). Off-network remote users benefit from the same level of security no matter where they are located. Customers that prefer a light-weight simplified branch (Thin Edge) are also supported via SASE.
• New Self-Healing SD-WAN Capabilities: Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution now includes self-healing capabilities through adaptive WAN remediations to make the application experience more resilient. Fortinet has also expanded its passive application monitoring for SaaS and multi-cloud applications for better user-experience to support users working from anywhere.
• Expanding the LTE Edge with 5G: Fortinet is extending network connectivity and security beyond the WAN Edge with innovations in 5G and LTE that improve wireless network performance and increase resiliency. With a diverse Wireless WAN and LTE offering, organizations can achieve secure, scalable, and highly available network connectivity anywhere.

Adaptive Cloud Security

• Optimized Performance and Security Across Multi-cloud Deployments: Organizations today struggle to manage and optimize application access and overall performance across multi-cloud environments. With the introduction of FortiOS 7.0, Fortinet’s adaptive cloud security offerings now provide central management for hybrid clouds with auto-scaling for practical usage of resources, dynamic load-balancing, and application user experience visibility – all designed to proactively improve overall performance and security within and across clouds.  

NOC/SOC

• Improved NOC and SOC Operational Efficiency: FortiOS 7.0 introduces new and expanded capabilities that offer network security teams of all sizes and sophistication more options to improve operational efficiency, including FortiManager/FortiAnalyzer integrations with the latest release of FortiSOAR as a container to fully orchestrate an organization’s security processes. New updates also simplify SaaS management and strengthen Fortinet’s ability to reduce the complexity of operations into a single management experience via FortiCloud. For organizations who wish to leverage our security expertise to augment their operational teams, Fortinet now offers SOC-as-a-Service and NOC Best Practice Service. 

FortiGuard Labs Threat Intelligence

• Web Protection Optimized for Work-from-home: TheFortiGuard security service portfolio includes a rich set of advanced security capabilities for content, users, devices, web access, and applications protection. With FortiOS 7.0, Fortinet enhances its already rich web protection offering with industry-first video filtering to provide even more granular protection for the video-intense content consumption patterns driven by the increase in work-from-home.