Fortinet recently announced the integration of Fortinet’s FortiGate best-of-breed next-generation firewall platform with the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Software Defined Networking, or SDN, fabric. As the industry’s fastest firewall appliance, the FortiGate integration with ACI will provide customers with firewall, advanced intrusion prevention (IPS), threat management and other security features in dynamic environments running Cisco networking fabric, for a variety of cloud and data centre use cases.  The result for enterprises and service providers is greater agility of their cloud and data centre networks, while maintaining the highest levels of security, privacy and compliance.

“Fortinet is dedicated to providing the greatest levels of security across multiple environments,” said Mary Yang, vice president of alliances at Fortinet. “We have been executing on a broad cloud and SDN vision and strategy to meet customer requirements as they look toward greater speed and agility in deploying applications and business services. By extending our efforts to Cisco’s ACI, the most requested SDN platform in the industry, Fortinet is fulfilling an integral piece of its overall strategy, and affirming our leadership position in data centre security.”

Working with Cisco, Fortinet is able to extend the agility and operational benefits of SDN security solutions, delivered from physical or virtual FortiGate security appliances, enabling customers to reduce operating expenses, strengthen security and derive more value from their investments in Cisco ACI and Fortinet security.

Erik Sohlman, manager of infrastructure at QBranch, an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) service provider in Stockholm, Sweden, said this about working with both Cisco ACI and Fortinet: “With ACI we can deliver better time-to-market with automation and scripting, and our customers also demand higher value L4-L7 services.  For the partner ecosystem that Cisco provides, the integration with major hypervisors and others like Fortinet is a true benefit to our business.”

The open framework of Cisco ACI enables ecosystem partners such as Fortinet to seamlessly interoperate with Cisco ACI fabric. Together, Cisco ACI with Fortinet network security solutions provide an automated approach based on application-specific policies that allow data centre applications to securely and dynamically scale on demand. For example, in cloud and managed service environments, as server, storage, other infrastructure areautomatically provisioned for a new application, security can be seamlessly deployed, ensuring proper security controls even before the application is launched. This helps to ensure privacy and compliance for tenants and business teams, and higher efficiency and agility for providers and internal IT.

“Cisco ACI provides an open framework with open APIs that support a broad ecosystem of industry leaders,” said Soni Jiandani, SVP, Cisco. “This allows our customers the ability to take advantage of their preferred vendors and solutions when they deploy ACI. ACI policy-based automation for both physical and virtual resources combined with the Fortinet FortiGate firewall platform delivers security and network automaton for our joint customers.”