Fortinet has announced a new class of internal firewall, dubbed the Internal Network Firewall (INFW), which addresses the ever-increasing sophistication and persistent dangers to organizations’ networks from threats that are inside the network. The company also announced major updates to their FortiGate firewall portfolio. All are available via the company’s channel partners.
The current state of network threat protection is often focused primarily on the border, working to prevent outside threats. Yet, this approach can be ineffective once a threat gets “past the gate” and enters the internal network by other means, such as endpoint devices, infected flash drives, or even internal employees or consultants, putting critical data at risk. The reality is that sophisticated hacker attacks and insider threats continue to penetrate more deeply and persist undetected for long periods of time inside an organization’s internal network, making it even more critical for organizations to mitigate potential damage. Hackers are taking advantage of the typically flat internal architectures to put internal networks at greater risk.
The INFW employs a layered approach to security that sits closer to the assets within an organizations’ network, segmenting and preventing breaches from spreading, while providing full visibility into all traffic types, users and devices, to help protect against threats inside the network.
Fortinet’s INFW takes advantage of the ASIC architecture to provide multi-gigabit throughput, without disruption to existing applications or systems.Pre-configured Transparent Mode enables rapid and easy deployment with instant network traffic visibility.
“Attacks are finding ever more ways into Enterprise networks, and once inside taking their time to cause damage,” said Jeff Wilson, principle security analyst at Infonetics Research, now part of IHS. “Enterprises need to find new ways to protect their networks from the inside-out, and to protect them continuously, so they can shorten the window of exposure to threats.”
