Fortinet Enhances the Industry’s Most Comprehensive Operational Technology Security Platform to Protect Cyber-Physical Systems

Fortinet announced updates to its OT security platform, which already stands as the industry’s most comprehensive. Today’s news provides customers with enhanced secure networking and security operations capabilities and expands Fortinet’s strategic partnerships with leading OT vendors, reflecting Fortinet’s commitment to security for the growing cyber-physical systems market and dedication to protecting critical infrastructure in verticals spanning energy, defense, water supply systems, manufacturing, food, transportation, and more. In fact, Fortinet was recently recognized as a Representative Vendor in the 2023 Gartner Market Guide for CPS Protection Platforms.

According to the Fortinet 2024 State of Operational Technology and Cybersecurity Report, cyberattacks that compromise OT systems are on the rise, with nearly three-fourths (73%) of organizations experiencing an intrusion that impacted either OT systems only or both IT and OT systems (up from 49% in 2023). As a result, it’s more critical than ever for organizations to deploy cybersecurity solutions specifically engineered for OT environments, including critical infrastructure.

Building upon its legacy of more than two decades as a global cybersecurity leader, Fortinet’s OT security platform was designed to mitigate industrial risk and accelerate and optimize customers’ OT security journeys. The latest updates to the platform include:

Fortinet’s global partner ecosystem brings together organizations with specialized OT expertise to help customers maximize cyber resiliency and improve operational efficiency.

Recent collaborations with Fortinet Alliance partners Armis and Claroty, as part of the Fortinet Open Ecosystem, have produced new and enhanced integrations with FortiManager, FortiSIEM, FortiSOAR, and FortiNAC to maximize actionable OT asset information, simplify OT network operations for customers, and improve customers’ security postures.

Additionally, Fortinet introduced a new Engage Preferred Services Partner (EPSP) OT Practice designation to empower OT channel partners with the tools they need to design and deploy OT network infrastructure.

Armis and Fortinet are a full stack best-in-class OT/IoT security solution that sees, protects, and manages every critical OT asset in the environment fully. The partnership between Armis and Fortinet is strategic and complementary for both our companies and our mutual customers. Being a partner in Fortinet’s industry-leading Fabric-Ready Alliance Program enables Armis to deepen the integrations between the Armis Centrix™ platform and the Fortinet Security Fabric, resulting in the broadest real-time visibility into IT/OT intersection risks and maximization of policy-driven enforcement of zero-trust network access and segmentation. Together, we co-innovate to address our customers' most consequential cyber risks in OT and enable protection at scale.

– Nadir Izrael, Co-Founder and CTO, Armis

Claroty xDome combined with the Fortinet Security Fabric delivers a level of visibility, context, and network policy enforcement that is unmatched in securing cyber-physical systems. Claroty’s zone-based policy recommendations and unique planning capabilities leveraged within the Fortinet Security Fabric via our unique FortiManager integration enable tangible risk reduction and remediation action, at scale, that dramatically accelerate OT segmentation and policy enforcement projects. As a partner in Fortinet’s Open Ecosystem, we’re able to drive key integrations that harness these capabilities to deliver a faster time to value for our customers.

– Stephan Goldberg, Vice President of Business Development, Claroty

With Fortinet, we centralized everything and brought all the management information we need into a single pane of glass. That enables us to quickly see what is happening across all our different units. Our Fortinet management systems consolidate information and do a good job of filtering through all the noise on the network to quickly identify issues. That streamlines my team’s processes, so we do not have to keep adding bodies just to look at logs.

– Dustin Fischer, Director of IT, Wunderlich-Malec Engineering

The [Fortinet Security] Fabric allows us to operate a lean team as we do not need a large staff to manage our security and network infrastructure. It drives efficiency through a single-pane-of-glass approach to device management and the ability to centrally configure policies and push them out to all devices. This is particularly important when incorporating new locations, as we believe it will help us easily scale in the years ahead.

– Chad Logan, Senior Director of IT and Applications, McPherson Companies

Source: Fortinet media announcement