Fortinet and IBM Cloud Collaborate to Help Clients Protect Their Workloads from Increased Cybersecurity Threats

Jay Jubran, Director, IBM Cloud Product Management and Infrastructure Services IBM and Vince Hwang, Senior Director, Cloud Security at Fortinet

As we see today’s threat landscape grow more sophisticated, we believe companies must do everything they can to stay ahead of costly security challenges. The 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report, sponsored by IBM, found that the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.45 million in 2023, which was a 15% increase over the last three years. The report also found that detection and escalation costs jumped 42% over this same time frame. With clients reporting that they are facing new network and application threats, it’s critical to have the right ecosystem of technology partners that can unite around a shared mission of protecting their clients from risk.

IBM and Fortinet have been working together since 2008 to help clients secure cloud networks and workloads. Building upon our collaboration, IBM Cloud and Fortinet today announced the availability of the Fortinet Virtual FortiGate Security Appliance (vFSA) on IBM Cloud. Fortinet’s new offering integrates all the capabilities of the Fortinet FortiGate hardware firewall form factor with the availability and flexibility of virtual appliances. The vFSA provides clients with the security capabilities of the FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) across the IBM Cloud network, designed to help protect clients’ networks carrying sensitive traffic and data to enable them to remain highly available.

The vFSA on IBM Cloud is a virtual security appliance with enablement delivered through FortiFlex, a flexible usage-based licensing program from Fortinet designed to help support organizations to dynamically right-size their services and spend while securing their cloud and hybrid environments. IBM Cloud customers who are looking to expand and scale their vFSA security will be able to leverage FortiFlex capabilities as needed.

This offering is designed to help clients keep their physical and virtual security environments protected with features such as:

• Automated deployments and simple migrations between form factors with on-demand and automated upgrade capabilities built into the user interface
• A virtual appliance deployed on dedicated infrastructure on IBM Cloud, designed to make client appliances highly available and address security risks
• A client managed security appliance with administrative root access, providing plug-and-play next-generation firewall capability

How Clients Can Benefit from vFSA on IBM Cloud

Clients across multiple industries can benefit from vFSA on IBM Cloud to support their security, performance, and resiliency needs, such as:

• Financial services: For financial institutions that have or are deploying regulated application workloads or managing sensitive data, vFSA can monitor and filter the network traffic to the necessary levels of controls to support the clients’ efforts to meet their compliance goals such as SOC 2 and other standards.
• Retail: The vFSA offering is designed to help retailers maintain visibility and their security controls across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, as they continue to migrate applications to the cloud for more flexibility, agility, and optimized time to market for new omnichannel applications.
• Manufacturing: We’re seeing manufacturing clients move critical applications to the cloud, which can help support innovation but can also present new threats and challenges. To help support clients’ security goals, Fortinet Virtual FortiGate Security Appliance is designed to help monitor and filter the network traffic for remote access and visibility into new devices being added such as IoT.

In addition to IBM Cloud, IBM also works with Fortinet as part of the Fortinet Open Ecosystem to provide managed security services and technology solutions that support comprehensive and security protection.

This product is available now across all 31 IBM Cloud Data Centers. Learn more.