Forrester recently published the Forrester Wave™: Industrial Control Systems (ICS) Security Solutions, Q4, 2021 report, and we are pleased to announce that Fortinet has been positioned as a Strong Performer. We believe our position in third-party reports such as the Forrester Wave highlights our scale, large customer base, and proven traction in the market to help organizations feel confident in their decision to work with Fortinet. We are also proud to be selected as one of only 12 vendors.
Besides receiving the highest score possible in the “number of customers” criterion, Fortinet received the highest score possible in six other criteria, including policy and rule management, microsegmentation, APIs and integrations, product security, partner ecosystem, and product revenue. We believe our 5/5 scores in the “Partner Ecosystem” and “APIs and Integrations” critieria are highly relevant considering, in our opinion, the placement of several Fortinet Fabric-Ready Technology Alliance partners in the Wave report. According to the Forrester report, “Fortinet’s strength in ICS security stems from its market-leading integration breadth with IT and OT technology vendors. This includes integrations with ICS security vendors and control system vendors.”
Fortinet’s technology integrations with top visibility and automation and control vendors, made possible through our open APIs via the Fabric-Ready Partner program, include such leaders as Claroty, Dragos, Microsoft, Nozomi, and Tenable. These close collaborations further emphasize the value Fortinet brings to securing OT environments. For example, our leading policy and microsegmentation capabilities are informed through these strategic partnerships, enabling our solutions to execute granular response and control of protocols and policies uniquely suited to each OT environment. The symbiotic relationship with our ecosystem partners’ technology provides customers with highly advanced cyber protection. We’re also proud that the majority of our OT ecosystem partners appreciate the breadth of Fortinet’s Security Fabric and integrate with multiple product families within the expansive Fortinet portfolio. This signals their commitment to Fortinet’s unique Security Fabric strategy of providing comprehensive defense-in-depth solutions that can span the most distributed OT environments.
While we are pleased to be identified as a Strong Performer in the Forrester report, we recognize that the Wave placed a relatively higher weighting on asset identification and visibility in evaluating the current offerings of all Wave participants. The first step any industrial asset owner should take is to segment their high CapEx OT assets away from their IT infrastructure. Segmenting critical assets should occur before investing in visibility and asset management infrastructure. One of our greatest strengths is that our market-leading FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls are ideally suited to this task, especially given our focus on Industrial OT protocol support and ruggedized designs that can withstand the harsh environments found on plant floors, production yards, or in the field.
Additionally, our industry-first Security Fabric approach provides OT-targeted features and capabilities in each of our product families, such as our fully integrated endpoint and deception technologies. FortiEDR not only includes application allow/deny lists but also runs on legacy operating systems, such as Windows XP, rarely supported by other EDR vendors yet all too often found in OT environments. Similarly, FortiDeceptor can mimic the PLCs and HMIs frequently found in ICS environments and respond in an OT manner, using commonly found OT protocols to provide seamless protections indistinguishable from legitimate ICS traffic. Similar OT-specific benefits can be found in our FortiSandbox, FortiNAC, FortiSIEM, and other products.
Fortinet is deeply committed to providing advanced and integrated security solutions designed for the challenges of today’s expanding and converging OT environments. That is why Forrester’s recognition of Fortinet is deeply gratifying. It should signal to organizations that Fortinet is uniquely positioned to provide the level of protection their networks require—whether implementing an integrated OT security fabric, seamlessly combining Fortinet solutions with those from other leading OT vendors, or building a comprehensive cybersecurity mesh architecture designed to span today’s hybrid IT and OT environments.
Read the Forrester Wave: ICS Security Solutions, Q4 2021 report or learn more about Fortinet’s Operational Technology solutions.
