What’s the theme of your participation at GITEX this year? What are the key aspects that you’re highlighting at the show?
Fortinet’s focus at GITEX this year is to enable businesses to address their most pressing cybersecurity challenges, including the severe cybersecurity skills gap and the explosion of the edge with work-from-anywhere approach. Our Fortinet Security Fabric mesh architecture has been available for several years now, and over time, customers keep adding to it. Our portfolio of more than 50 security and networking technologies is designed from the ground up to interoperate, sharing threat intelligence, correlating data, and automatically responding to threats as a single, coordinated system.Â
On site, visitors will experience the key pillars of the Fortinet Security Fabric such as the Zero-Trust Network which securely connects applications hosted everywhere with users working from anywhere;  Security Operations which enables fast, coordinated detection and enforcement across the entire attack surface; Network Security which addresses digital acceleration challenges by tightly integrating network infrastructure with advanced security across all edges; and Cloud Security which delivers visibility and control across cloud infrastructures, enabling secure applications and connectivity in the data center and across cloud resources while maximising the benefits of cloud computing. Also, in focus will be FortiSASE, Fortinet’s cloud-delivered security that secures remote users and powered by widely deployed FortiOS and FortiGuard AI-powered security services including SWG, FWaaS, ZTNA, CASB to allow organisations to shift from a CAPEX to OPEX business model.
What differentiates your participation this year as compared to previous years?
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.
To meet these expectations, organisations have had to support two critical functions. First, they have had to rapidly expand the network edge, resulting in hybrid networks that span data centers, campus networks, branch and home offices, mobile users and devices, and multi-cloud environments. And second, they have had to provide consistent protection against the rising rate of cybercrime.
Helping customers effectively address these changes requires rethinking critical strategies, resulting in the need to converge networking and security. And Fortinet is well-positioned to continue to meet the needs of organisations looking to enable digital acceleration through convergence. This unique approach makes the difference today and for the future.
What does the ‘next digital universe’ mean to you?
The transformation that most networks are currently undergoing is far larger, and more impactful, than most people recognise. IoT devices, cloud computing, and rapid business application development have accelerated the collection and distribution of Big Data. And the data centers tasked with mining that data to drive business agility and responsiveness even further are adding AI and Machine Learning to make that possible. The result is hyperspeed, hyperconnectivity, and hyperscale all growing at an exponential rate.
All of this lays the foundation for things like smart cars, smart buildings, smart cities, and smart infrastructures – including smart transportation, power grids, and manufacturing. And the growth of faster and smarter mobile devices and new edge computing models powered by 5G are going to accelerate all of this even further and faster as billions of new edge environments are added to and interconnected across a global network of networks, both public and private.
What are the challenges and opportunities in this ‘next digital universe’? How do you aim to support organisations in this journey?
Cybersecurity must be a fundamental feature of every product and system from the moment that it is conceived, enabling it to automatically interoperate, expand, contract, and scale in real time. To achieve this degree of deep security integration – something absolutely essential to achieving and maintaining a truly digital society and economy – cybersecurity leaders need to address four fundamental challenges:
Sharing Information in Real Time: Speed is fundamental to an effective cybersecurity strategy. And to make that challenge harder, an increasing percentage of the growing volume of internet traffic is also now encrypted.
Wide and Deep Collaboration: Collaboration needs to be both wide and deep. Wide because everyone is engaged in a common conversation about cybersecurity and addressing our common enemies. And deep because conversation alone isn’t enough.
Building a Common Vision: We are facing a growing cybersecurity skills gap that threatens the very existence of our fledgling digital economy, a strategy that spans public and private organisations to educate individuals to be aware of the risks of functioning in a digital world need to be implemented.
Promoting the technology platform, we need to make this work: Robust security needs to be provided across the distributed network, combined with low latency and high performance – especially with the deployment of 5G networks.
And finally, we need to invest in machine learning and artificial intelligence to increase our ability to correlate all of this data, detect anomalies and threats, respond in real time, and share new intelligence back into a common repository to make everyone safer.
