Digital Innovation Has Transformed the Way We Live

The rapid rise of both e-commerce and online gaming expresses society’s firm reliance on the power of the internet and what services they expect it to deliver. The proof, as reported by the US Department of Commerce, is that e-commerce increased from $461B in 2017 to $602B in 2020 – a 31% increase.

New trends like 5G will transform what’s possible even further by enabling a world of hyperconnectivity between users-users, users-machines, and machine-machines that require hyper speed and hyperscale.

Because of the speed at which user traffic is growing – propelled by the rate at which applications, workflows, and transactions need to take place – many organizations have had to adopt a hyperscale data center. And a growing number of these high-performance networks are built using advanced routing and switching infrastructures. 

As a result, traditional security solutions are being discarded because they cannot provide adequate protection due to inherent performance limitations that lead to workflow bottlenecks and poor user experience. In many instances, security has been deprioritized in favor of preserving user experience because security devices would meltdown when they were used to secure user consumption of online services. Instead, a growing number of organizations have had to replace their enterprise-grade security with VLANs and Layer 4 access controls lists to protect their high-performance environments.

It’s a terrible tradeoff.

From a security perspective, this can be disastrous. These alternatives do little to prevent attackers from impersonating themselves as legitimate users, establishing a beachhead, and then moving laterally across the network to gain access to credentials, applications, and data. Using a completely different attack method, nefarious actors could also send volumes of requests to overwhelm a website. This could bring down e-commerce sites or online services, resulting in the loss of revenue, bad press, and in worst cases, shut an organization’s doors – permanently.

Organizations should never have to make the impossible choice between performance and protection.

Disruptions Can Result in a Detour, but the Journey to Dgital Innovation Continues

While organizations were mulling over the tradeoff of providing high-speed online services to grow their business while reducing the uncertainties of not having high-performance security controls in place, a more certain calamity hit us – the onset of the COVID19 pandemic. Those same organizations had to pivot their resources to quickly provision a suddenly massive remote workforce with encryption-based VPN technologies. Business continuity and disaster recovery plans were initiated to keep workers productive and maintain morale during a time of uncertainty.

However, far too many organizations quickly found that their firewalls – built using off-the-shelf hardware – did not provide enough scalability and performance headroom to inspect and secure the large number of remote connections that had come online. Even after paying high VPN upgrade license fees to scale connectivity, they still had to install new firewalls to deal with escalating scale and performance needs. And as a result, two of their prevailing concerns about cost and complexity just got exacerbated. 

But a Time of Crisis Can Also Become of a Time of Opportunity 

The outgrowth of this sudden transformation of networks around the world is that users are now able to more effectively collaborate – between themselves, with customers, and with partners – in ways unfathomable before. Using rich streaming media enables organizations to deliver content and collaboration and training while preserving the user experience. This is now the new normal.

But capitalizing on this opportunity requires building ultra-high-performance networks capable of handling the needs of both external and internal users equally well. But these same networks create security challenges that require an approach that traditional, off-the-shelf hardware-based firewalls cannot address.

Build Ultra-Fast Security-Driven Networks with FortiGate 4200F

The power to provide the security that today’s networks require is only possible by using purpose-built hardware. Fortinet’s latest NP7 network processor ­- enables astronomical performance and unparalleled capacity, all delivered in the industry’s most cost-effective FortiGate 4200F security platform. 

As an integral part of the Fortinet Security Fabric, the FortiGate 4200F has been specifically engineered to deliver the scalability and performance required for the networks of today and tomorrow by enabling an innovative, security-driven network approach that seamlessly integrates networking with security. And it provides the highest Security Compute Ratings in the industry to meet the extraordinary demands of today’s data center security demands.

The hardware acceleration of FortiGate 4200F is made possible through Fortinet’s seventh-generation network processor, the NP7, that delivers Security Compute Ratings 5 to 15 times higher than any other security solution in the market. For example, it offers 15X the industry’s average with more than 8M sessions per second. 

The FortiGate 4200F also delivers the highest speed, scale, and performance for large enterprises and MSSPs, allowing mobile operators to provide security capable of protecting the hyperconnected world. It offers 400M of normal or carrier-grade NAT user connection scalability – providing the highest Security Compute Rating of 14x above the industry average. 

By delivering the industry’s highest performance, it securely enables the most demanding digital innovation as well as meets the vast capacity and performance demands of critical business operations, both now as well as a future-proof investment against future calamities. 

Essential FortiGate 4200F Use Cases

  • Financial services organizations building massively scalable remote access: In this ever-changing world, financial services organizations need to enable a remote workforce to come online expeditiously and conduct sensitive transactions that rely on microsecond responses – speed translates to productivity. The FortiGate 4200F offers the industry’s highest security compute rating of 10x for IPsec-encrypted performance, allowing organizations to maintain business continuity while sustaining ongoing operations.  
  • Large manufacturing and energy companies managing internal security risks: Addressing the growing attack surface, especially in today’s dynamic networked environments, is essential for protecting critical applications running across sensitive infrastructures. Providing trusted application access and maintaining compliance requires these organizations to segment their networks at scale. With a Security Compute Rating of 5x for SSL inspection (including TLS 1.3), FortiGate 4200F delivers the industry’s best price/performance.
  • High-velocity e-retail and e-commerce providers handling event-based connection bursts: Managing previously unseen capacity requirements and support for up to tens of millions of user connections per second is mandatory for today’s virtual business environments. With a Security Compute Rating of 14x for connections per second, the FortiGate 4200F provides high-performance security to handle escalating business needs without compromising user experience. With a further Security Compute Rating of 8x for firewall functionality, FortiGate 4200F delivers essential protection for a wide variety of online businesses.
  • Advanced pharmaceutical research, oil and gas, and government organizations that require support for elephant flows. Today’s data centers need to securely transfer massive datasets (e.g., 1 TB files) for activities such as AI/ML simulations used within cutting-edge research. The FortiGate 4200F allows the rapid transfer of large datasets by supporting multiple 100Gbps elephant flows so that organizations don’t have to choose between performance and protection. 
  • Cloud providers and large enterprises that must segment massively scalable virtual networks: Typical security products that use software-based Virtual Extension LAN (VXLAN) solutions have low performance and high latency, which increases time to service. FortiGate 4200F offers hardware-accelerated VXLAN to enable secure and super-fast communication without impacting performance.

Continue on Your Path of Digital Innovation Without Compromise with the FortiGate 4200F

With its unmatched scale, performance, acceleration, internal segmentation capabilities, speed, and agility, NP7-powered FortiGate 4200F NGFWs provide large organizations with the ability to develop and segment services, manage internal and external risks, secure large-volume transactions, and preserve user experience. Fortinet’s NP7 will also power future FortiGate appliances to enable agile, high-performance security for hyperscale data centers and other environments where hyperscale, hyperconnectivity, and hyperperformance are table stakes. 

Read more about how the FortiGate 4200F enables ultra-fast network firewalling, accelerated internal segmentation, and massively scalable teleworker solutions.

Find out how Echoenergia and New Zealand Red Cross used Fortinet’s Security Fabric for protection from the network edge to core.

Engage in our Fortinet user community (Fuse). Share ideas and feedback, learn more about our products and technology, or connect with peers.

Sourced from Fortinet

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