Four virtual appliances for cloud security
Fortinet announced four new virtual appliances that extend the company’s ability to deliver security across virtualized and cloud environments.
The FortiGate, FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer and FortiMail virtual appliances combine with physical appliances to provide customers with a choice of physical and virtual form factors, working together to mitigate security blind spots and increase security controls within virtualized infrastructure environments. These virtual security appliances were built to run on top of VMware hypervisors.
Like a traditional FortiGate appliance, a FortiGate virtual appliance protects infrastructure from a broad array of threats by enabling customers to consolidate their stand-alone security technologies, reducing the cost and complexity of their security infrastructure. Customers can combine firewall, VPN, intrusion prevention, malware prevention, application security and complete content protection, data loss prevention, Web filtering, antispam, and have the added advantage of being able to inspect inter-zone traffic. In addition, FortiGate virtual appliances can be used in conjunction with traditional FortiGate appliances to help ensure both the perimeter and the virtual layers within a virtual environment are protected, visible and easy to manage.
FortiManager virtual appliances supply the tools needed to effectively manage any size Fortinet security infrastructure, from a few devices to thousands of appliances and endpoint security agents. The appliances provide centralized policy-based provisioning, configuration and update management for FortiGate, FortiWiFi and FortiMail appliances, as well as FortiClient endpoint agents.
FortiAnalyzer virtual appliances securely aggregate log data from Fortinet devices and other syslog-compatible devices. Using a comprehensive suite of easily-customized reports, users can filter and review records, including traffic, event, virus, attack, Web content and email data, mining the data to determine security stance and help assure regulatory compliance. It also provides advanced security management functions such as quarantined file archiving, event correlation, vulnerability assessments, traffic analysis and archiving of email, Web access, instant messaging and file transfer content.
FortiMail virtual messaging security appliances were designed to block inbound spam and malware before it can clog a network and affect users. They also help prevent outbound spam or malware (including 3G mobile traffic) from causing other antispam gateways to blacklist users.
The virtual appliances work similarly to their hardware counterparts, in that the company continues to provide virtual Domain (VDOM) and Administrative Domain (ADOM) technologies for securing and managing virtual and multi-tenant environments. The virtualization technologies work in conjunction with industry-standard Virtual LANs (VLANs) to enable a single virtual or physical Fortinet device to support hundreds of domains within the environment, providing essential visibility and security controls between zones while maintaining the benefits of virtualization.