Fortinet has updated its flagship operating system, FortiOS, with more than 300 new features and services.

New zero trust network access (ZTNA) enhancements make work-from-anywhere (WFA) deployments easier. In addition, advances in automation increase uptime for the WAN and LAN edge.

Moreover, additional upgrades are spread across next-generation firewall (NGFW), identity, microsegmentation, secure access service edge (SASE), AIOps and digital experience monitoring to further networking and security convergence.

Fortinet FortiOS 7.2 is available now.

Fragmented Security Leaving Businesses Vulnerable

John Maddison is Fortinet’s CMO and executive vice president of products.

Fortinet’s John Maddison

“The changing needs of business, driven by digital acceleration, are being met with increasing velocity, sophistication and volume of cyber threats,” he said. “However, security is still being bolted onto the network as an afterthought by many organizations rather than being fully integrated across the distributed network. In this approach, solving a particular security issue means buying yet another product. But such a piecemeal approach has led to increasing complexity, resulting in a lack of visibility and control that is neither sustainable nor secure. In such a fragmented security environment, essential tools like centralized management and automation are impossible to deliver.”

FortiOS 7.2 enhances Fortinet’s ability to converge networking and security, and consolidate security point products to “solve today’s toughest challenges in securing digital business,” Maddison said.

Fortinet FortiOS is the foundation of Fortinet’s security fabric, he said. It allows Fortinet partners to create “highly differentiated” service offerings. They can also take advantage of new sales opportunities.

“With the enhancements delivered in FortiOS 7.2, it only makes these offerings better,” Maddison said. “Fortinet Secure SD-WAN is already the industry’s most comprehensive WAN edge solution. But now we’re helping organizations get even better ROI with additional enhancements across SD-WAN, SD-Branch, 5G and ZTNA.”

Enabling Work from Anywhere

Fortinet is delivering a ZTNA solution that is available across all work locations to enable true WFA, Maddison said. It’s now easier to roll out with new unified policy configuration in a single graphical user interface (GUI) for every connection, and ZTNA service portal improvements.

“Fortinet already delivers the the industry’s only converged networking and security solution across the WAN and LAN edge,” he said. “But now with FortiOS 7.2, we’re making it even faster to roll out with new auto-deployment and zero-touch provisioning features to help IT teams easily scale their WAN edge and/or LAN edge deployments. Teams can also now perform end-to-end segmentation of traffic across LAN and WAN to further improve their security posture.”

Enterprises thrive with an aggressive digital goal, Maddison said. Securing digital acceleration requires infrastructure and security teams to converge their vision. They need to stop thinking about networking and security as separate strategies.

“Fortinet is the only vendor delivering a converged networking and security platform today,” he said. “This is a huge competitive advantage for Fortinet partners because it enables them to not only differentiate their business, but also solve their customers’ biggest challenges with networks that can adapt at speed and scale to secure every edge.”