Fortinet, VMware Ally To Secure Unified Virtual And Physical Networks

Fortinet, the high-performance network security solutions provider, has announced a proof of concept designed to secure traffic traversing virtual networks at the hypervisor level. With this approach, the security enforcement point is no longer required to be directly in the flow of traffic on the physical network and allows for injecting security controls before the traffic traverses the virtual network layer.

Specifically, the proof of concept will show secured traffic flow in a VMware virtualised network environment that highlights security policy enforcement of communication across and between physical and logical workloads.

“Historically, security controls were required to be directly in the path of affected communication flow. Our VMware integration allows for a much less intrusive design and enables dynamic policy control,” said Elie Bitton, senior director, product management – virtualisation and management for Fortinet. “Today’s demonstration enhances our already mature unified threat management VM product line and gives our customers yet another choice regarding how they want to deploy security for cloud and software defined data center architectures. As customers begin to virtualise the cloud network with the new VMware NSX network virtualisation platform, we will provide holistic security across virtual and physical infrastructures.”

As leading IT organisations move toward software defined data centers, they are looking for solutions that can be inserted and deleted on demand to after maximum agility and service quality. VMware NSX will virtualise the network and provide a platform for logical security and network services. VMware NSX will leverage a distributed service framework to facilitate partner service insertion.

“VMware is working with a best-in-class security ecosystem of partners to automate and simplify security for customers embracing network virtualisation as they transition to the software-defined data center,” said Milin Desai, director, product management, VMware. “Together, VMware and Fortinet are collaborating to ensure smooth operations, IT efficiency and business continuity as customers virtualise their networks.”