In speaking at the Midwest Enterprise Summit Fall Conference about the state of the IT security industry, Joe Sykora, Vice President of Americas Channels & Enhanced Technologies for cybersecurity security vendor Fortinet, described it as “a new world, with new rules and no compromises.”
During his keynote address on Monday, Sykora talked about the rise in cybersecurity crimes in recent years that have been making news headlines around the world.
“There is too much focus on compliance, there is too much risk base, and there are too many complex point solutions that don’t talk to each other,” he said. It all adds up to make cybersecurity a growing concern for businesses and organizations today, including those in the mid-market.
He also talked about the changing IT landscape, which has become far more complex in recent years with more point solutions than in the past and with the growing adoption of IoT initiatives and the cloud.
“Complexity is the enemy of security,” said Sykora, who described the current security landscape as “borderless.” Sykora told the CIO and IT leaders in the audience that simply deploying end-to-end security is no longer enough in today’s IT environment. Sykora was honored at this year’s Midsize Enterprise Summit as a member of the prestigious Top Midmarket Vendor Executive list for 2017. The list recognizes the most influential executives in the midmarket today.
“Your gateway firewall is essentially dead in today’s complex and borderless IT environment,” he said. As a result, it is easier than ever before for hackers to find more ways to get into a target company’s IT system.
Fortinet is a leading global provider of network security appliances for carriers, data centers, enterprises and distributed offices. Fortinet provides security solutions for network, endpoint, application, data center, cloud, and access designed to work together as an integrated and collaborative security fabric. By combining purpose-built ASICs, an intuitive operating system and applied threat intelligence, the company is able to provide security, exceptional performance and better visibility and control, while also providing easier administration for its fast-growing client base, he said.
Sykora said that Fortinet has been growing at an average of more than 40 percent year over year in recent years and has delivered more security devices than any other vendor since 2013. Fortinet has shipped over 2.7 million security appliances since its founding in 2000.
Last month, Fortinet launched the security industry’s first universal wireless access point that automate operations and defend against IoT threats with the Fortinet Security Fabric.
During his presentation, Sykora reviewed the five key components of the Fortinet Security Fabric, which includes the key capabilities an organization needs to protect the entire network, from IoT to the cloud:
- Scalable: Protects the enterprise, from IoT to the cloud
- Secure: Global and local threat intelligence and mitigation information is shared between products for faster protection
- Aware: The fabric behaves as a single entity regarding policy and logging, enabling end-to-end segmentation for better protection against advanced threats
- Actionable: Big data cloud systems correlate threat and network data to deliver real-time, actionable threat intelligence
- Open: Well-defined, open APIs allow leading technology partners to become part of the fabric
To check out more information about Fortinet and to review a variety of customer testimonials, visit their website at https://www.fortinet.com/.
The company also offers a cyber threat assessment program designed to gauge the current security, productivity and performance levels at no cost; call Fortinet for full details on the program to see if it is appropriate for your organization.
Janice Cain, MBA, is an award-winning marketing consultant and PR advisor who has been working extensively in the IT industry for more than 10 years with some of the world’s best known software and hardware companies. Follow her @1010_Marketing
