Fortinet
Powered and Secured Wireless LAN Integration

Wireless LANs are shifting from a ‘nice to have’ overlay network for guest access to a truly business critical infrastructure. Market leaders are anxious to deploy new wireless technologies such as wireless Point of Sale in retail and wireless patient monitoring in healthcare, within their organization infrastructure. These technologies can transform business operations to provide unique competency over contenders. “These transformations within the networking sector, however, involves the challenge to implement a wireless LAN infrastructure to support new wireless enabled technologies that is reliable and secure, thus minimizing the risk of data breaches,” asserts Ken Xie, CEO, Fortinet.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, Fortinet provides network and cyber security solutions for enterprises, carriers, data centers, distributed offices and MSSPs. “Fortinet’s philosophy has always been to consolidate various technologies into a single appliance, simplifying management and enhancing operational efficiency,” says Xie. To this end, the company integrates its enterprise grade Wireless LAN controller into the FortiGate security appliance, providing a true ‘single pane of glass’ to manage the security of both the wired and wireless network. The integration of Wireless LAN controller into the FortiGate appliance allows its clients to easily apply the network security policies from the wired LAN to the wireless LAN, simplifying management process and therefore improving operational efficiency. “The unified management of the wired and wireless security simplifies security compliance and ensures there are no gaps in the security policy, creating a true Unified Access Layer,” extols Xie. Fortinet not only offers FortiGate managed Wireless APs, but also renders wired switches and 4G LTE Wireless WAN modems that are managed by the FortiGate. This integration results in a complete end-to-end enterprise connectivity and security solution.

The company is known for developing industry leading ASIC technology that offloads security processing tasks from general purpose CPUs to its custom ASICs, enabling the firm to consistently deliver the world’s fastest ‘firewalls’. “With our latest FortiASIC, the NP6, we also offload wireless processing to the chip, enabling us to deliver the world’s fastest wireless controller,” says Xie.

Fortifying the company’s excellence is its vast customer base. To illustrate, Fortinet recently assisted one of its clients—Oaknoll retirement community in the U.S., to securely deploy critical Voice over Wireless LAN (VoWLAN) and Nurse Call systems using Fortinet’s wireless LAN solution. The company also enabled residents to connect to the Wi-Fi t h roug hout the facility. “What’s nice about this solution is that we not only enabled the business to become more efficient, but also helped improve the quality and enjoyment of life for the residents,” explains Xie.

Fortinet’s competency comes from its depth of knowledge in security and ease of management in the Wireless LAN market. “With the number of enterprise data breaches rapidly increasing, we feel that security is the most important aspect of any wireless LAN deployment,” says Xie. The company’s unified wired and wireless security platform leverages the work of over 200 dedicated threat researchers operating from FortiGuard labs, ensuring the protection of enterprise networks from the latest threats.

Referring to the wireless LAN technology boom and the anticipated demands for expanded LAN bandwidth, the company envisages creating new access points that would leverage the Wave 2 version of the 802.11ac protocol. “In addition to the increased throughput, we’re also working on integrating additional security processing technology into our chips on our APs themselves, pushing wireless LAN security enforcement even closer to the access edge of the network,” Xie concludes.

With our latest FortiASIC, the NP6, we offload wireless processing to the chip, enabling us to deliver the world’s fastest wireless controller