Partner Spotlight: Gigamon and Fortinet Integrate Technologies to Deliver Cybersecurity Controls Without Network Disruption

Fortinet was founded in 2000 by Ken Xie, the visionary founder and former president and CEO of NetScreen. From its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and its offices around the globe, Fortinet is leading the evolution of network and security, enabling security at any network edge.

We recently chatted with Sonal Uban, director of marketing for technology alliances at Fortinet, to discover how Fortinet and Gigamon work together to deliver broad cybersecurity innovations and excellence to myriad customers.

Gigamon: Who is Fortinet? 

Sonal: Fortinet secures the largest enterprise, service provider, and government organizations around the world. We empower our customers with intelligent, seamless protection across the expanding attack surface and the ability to take on ever-increasing performance requirements of the borderless network — today and into the future.

Only the Fortinet Security Fabric architecture can deliver security without compromise to address the most critical security challenges, whether in networked, application, cloud, or mobile environments. Fortinet ranks number one in the most security appliances shipped worldwide, and more than 580,000 customers trust Fortinet to protect their businesses.

Gigamon: What is Fortinet’s unique value proposition?

Sonal: Fortinet is the only security leader to develop and build custom security processing unit (SPU) technology that offers the best price, performance, and value in the industry, with Security Compute Ratings that are multiples that of other vendors with more software-oriented or CPU-driven approaches.

Each day, Fortinet FortiGuard Labs uses one of the most effective and proven artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems in the industry to process and analyze more than 100 billion events daily, sending actionable, real-time threat intelligence to customers. The combination of FortiOS, purpose-built SPU technology, and AI-powered threat intelligence showcases the Fortinet commitment to cybersecurity innovation and excellence.

Gigamon: Describe your company culture. What makes you tick?

Sonal: At Fortinet, our customers are our top priority. We have a high-performing, driven, results-oriented culture. It’s the type of environment where you can get things done, explore your own innovation and creativity, and feel proud about the difference you are able to achieve. We encourage ideas and provide patent incentives to do so. We are motivated by our shared passion for creating cutting-edge technology and protecting those who rely on it. It’s a fast-paced environment with lots of moving parts, but we work well together and take every opportunity to have a little fun.

Gigamon: If you had to describe Gigamon with just one word, what would it be?

Sonal: Observant.

Gigamon: How do Fortinet and Gigamon work together to solve your customers’ problems?

Sonal: Anytime you can strengthen a customer’s cybersecurity posture without disruption, it’s a huge win. The foundational capabilities of Gigamon, combined with the security analytics and enforcement capabilities of the Fortinet suite, solve many headaches that occur in modern, dynamic architectures.

Gigamon: What are some of your market’s specifics, advantages, and challenges when it comes to network security and visibility?

Sonal: Over these past two years, business continuity required networks to rapidly adapt and diversify, resulting in the creation of hybrid networks and highly distributed workforces. This resulting digital acceleration also led to fundamental changes in businesses, customers, industries, and governments.

Today, people worldwide expect to access any information or application, regardless of where it has been deployed, using any device and from any location, and they expect security to be interwoven without any impact to performance or access. Legacy systems cannot provide the flexibility or level of security required for today’s dynamic networks and workers.

Gigamon: Which Gigamon features stand out the most?

Sonal: It’s critical to be able to interconnect different networking architectures in a dynamic environment without being disruptive to the customers’ business. High-availability traffic routing to FortiGate via Gigamon Inline Bypass is a critical element that makes Gigamon stand out as a leader in this space. It enables the use of out-of-band security tools to analyze and address cybersecurity threats with no disruption to customers.

Gigamon: Provide an anecdote that customers share when they talk about our joint solution.

Sonal: The Fortinet Security Fabric, empowered by FortiOS 7.2, introduces new inline security features, more convergence, and simplified operations. Customers have appreciated the partnership and joint solution with Gigamon. It sits inline with the Fortinet Security Fabric and introduces a visibility layer between the network and security stacks that sees everything in the network –– and can control which traffic goes to security tools. Gigamon provides the ability to bypass traffic and send it directly back into the network, ensuring no downtime. Once changes are complete, a single click will start sending traffic right back to the firewall.

We’ve heard our customers tell us how the solution not only saves countless hours taken up by the maintenance window but also provides an additional layer that prevents downtime due to tool failure. It helps remove any noise from traffic before sending it to the firewall for inspection. A further benefit is the ability to load balance traffic among multiple firewalls and daisy chain traffic through multiple tools, sending sanitized traffic back to the network.

Gigamon: What is the most memorable moment associated with Gigamon as a partner?

Sonal: We’ve been partners for more than seven years, and it’s been truly memorable to be able to participate in and witness Gigamon’s evolution into a dominant network visibility solution provider.

Gigamon: What are some of the new challenges you see in the market that the partnership with Gigamon can solve? 

Sonal: Our partnership addresses issues resulting from rapid growth in the hybrid, multicloud, datacenter, and endpoint environments, helping those seeking to implement Zero Trust network architectures. Gigamon provides its collected data to Fortinet via Fabric-Ready technology integrations.

Gigamon: What are the positive business outcomes as a Gigamon alliance partner? What unique capabilities does this partnership bring to our joint business?

Sonal: Leveraging the network traffic, flow records, and both network and application metadata collected by the Gigamon Hawk Deep Observation Pipeline provides our joint customers the ability to enforce cybersecurity best practices with a variety of Fortinet technologies. The metadata supplied to and acted upon by FortiGate, ForiSIEM, FortiWAF, FortiSandbox, and FortiSOAR can solve numerous use cases around visibility, application filtering, and solving complex security challenges related to highly connected networks and applications.

Gigamon: Who is the target audience (i.e., SecOps, NetOps, DevOps, etc.) for our joint solution, and how do they benefit? 

Sonal: Both NetOps and SecOps benefit from the integration of Gigamon with Fortinet Fabric-Ready technology. Anytime you can bring increased visibility, dynamic networking, and cybersecurity controls into an environment with no disruption, it’s a game-changer.

Gigamon: Which verticals/segments are the best target companies? Where have we seen success, and why?

Sonal: We play well together in large to very large enterprises where we jointly achieve complete network visibility, physically, virtually, and via the public cloud.

Gigamon: Thank you, Sonal, for making time for us and for being such a wonderful partner.