As the threat landscape expands, your clients are faced with more potential breaches, more vectors for infection and more opportunities for mayhem if unauthorised players get inside their networks.

Traditional firewalls are now just the beginning of an effective security strategy. Your clients now have to be thinking about protecting nodes on the network, regardless of where they sit. Inside or outside the firewall, wireless or wired, web applications, mobile, in the cloud, wherever, in fact, people and devices connect to their network. In short, network security is getting right down to the granular level.

Security transition

“We're in the midst of a transition,” says Andrew Khan, Fortinet Senior Business Manager at Ingram Micro, New Zealand's largest distributor of Fortinet's cyber security solutions. “As the attack surface grows the nature of the threats potentially disrupting your client's operations are morphing and uncovering new avenues for ingress, their defences have to keep up. Traditionally they could protect their networks at the edge and that was sufficient. But today the threats are vertical: they can attack at any one of the network layers. Threats are ‘east-west: if attackers get inside the network they must be stopped. And threats are fast. It takes only seconds for malware to work its damage. And days, if not weeks, to clean up the mess.

Pervasive security

The solution is pervasive security at the granular level, total network transparency and a common security fabric to tie it all together. “That's exactly what Fortinet has developed with their Secure Access Architecture and Security Fabric,” says Khan. “Your clients can protect every device that connects the network and manage the entire process from a single management console.

Complexity is the enemy of security. Siloed security solutions with separate management interfaces and no meaningful way to gather or share threat information with other devices on your client's network are only marginally useful. The truth is, many new solutions never actually get fully deployed because there simply isn't enough manpower to assign to installing, managing, optimising, and updating another complicated device.

Detect, mitigate, prevent

With Fortinet, all of that is history. But that's just the hardware side. The security process has also taken a leap forward with Fortinet's three-phase approach to security. “First, you have to focus on protecting your critical assets by detecting and blocking as much bad stuff as possible,” explains Khan. “You also have to assume that malware and attackers will get through your client's defenses, so you need to develop an increased ability to detect and respond as quickly as possible to a threat.  We know that once in, attackers will act fast, so you need to implement strategies to slow them down to give you time to fight through the attack.  And finally, you need good forensics tools so clients can calculate the impact of a successful attack in order to gather intelligence and further harden their defences.

Fortinet CTAP: Fast track your client's security and your sales

Ingram Micro is currently promoting the Fortinet Cyber Assessment Program (CTAP). With this pre-packaged ‘proof-of-concept' exercise, you deploy, with your prospect's permission, a Fortinet Next Generation Firewall (typically a 100D, 300D or 1500D, depending on traffic) demo unit behind their current firewall for a week. The NGFW captures a set of data which you upload to the Fortinet CTAP facility. You'll then receive a comprehensive report to share with the prospect. They can see, in no uncertain terms, where the weak spots in their network security are. “CTAP has proven to be quite successful so far,” Khan continues, “and we encourage all Partners to take advantage of this unique offer.

“Yes, it all takes time to play in the network security arena,” Khan concludes. “But it's an investment you have to make. Your clients can't make the time nor do they have the expertise. So it's up to you. Don't let them down. Give us a call and we'll do what we can to help.

For further information, please contact:

Andrew Khan, Senior Business Manager Email: andrew.khan@ingrammicro.com M: 021 819 793

David Hills, Solutions Architect Email: david.hills@ingrammicro.com M: 021 245 0437

Hugo Hutchinson, Business Development Manager Email: hugo.hutchinson@ingrammicro.com P: 09-414-0261 | M: 021-245-8276

Marc Brunzel, Business Development Manager Email: marc.brunzel@ingrammicro.com  M: 021 241 6946