Fortinet + Lacework: The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts

Introduction

In the evolving cybersecurity landscape, businesses face challenges as they adopt more cloud-native architectures and multi-cloud strategies. The transition to the cloud has increased complexity, making it critical for organizations to deploy security solutions that can address cloud environments' unique risks and requirements. Fortinet, one of WWT's top security vendors and a leader in network security, recently acquired Lacework, a cloud security platform specializing in visibility, anomaly detection, and threat management for cloud-native infrastructures. 

This acquisition represents a key move in Fortinet's strategy to expand its cloud security capabilities and create a more comprehensive security portfolio spanning the network perimeter to the cloud. In this article, we'll explore how Lacework's cloud security expertise complements and enhances Fortinet's existing solutions, completing its cloud security portfolio.

Lacework's Role in cloud security

Lacework has specialized in securing cloud environments, particularly for organizations leveraging cloud-native technologies like containers, Kubernetes, microservices, and serverless computing. Lacework's platform takes an agentless, API-based approach and focuses on providing. 

Visibility Across Cloud Environments: Lacework offers deep visibility into cloud infrastructure, including networks, workloads, and applications, providing a unified view of security across multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP).

Anomaly Detection Using Behavioral Analytics: Lacework uses machine learning and behavioral analytics to detect anomalies that traditional security tools might miss. This helps identify unusual behaviors, such as privilege escalation, suspicious network activity, and other signs of potential threats. 

Threat Detection and Response: Lacework monitors cloud resources to detect and alert security teams to suspicious activities in real time, helping organizations respond swiftly to potential incidents.

Compliance Monitoring: Lacework assists organizations in maintaining compliance with various industry standards (e.g., PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR) by providing automated configuration checks and audit-ready reports.

Scalability and Automation: Lacework is designed to scale modern cloud environments. It automates many security aspects, such as configuration management and threat detection, to reduce security teams' operational overhead. 

This combination of cloud-native capabilities within a single platform makes Lacework a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). Lacework was one of the first of its kind. Traditional cloud security products have been "point" solutions, each focused on a specific area of need within the cloud. CNAPP breaks down those silos and correlates data that you would typically find from these point products, then makes sense of it in a way that saves significant time and effort for the security and development teams using the platform.

How Lacework enhances Fortinet's cloud security portfolio

Fortinet has built a reputation for delivering high-performance, integrated security solutions that span network, endpoint, application, and cloud security. The acquisition of Lacework fills critical gaps in Fortinet's cloud security capabilities, ensuring the company's portfolio meets the needs of organizations migrating to the cloud.

Unified Security Across the Entire IT Ecosystem

Before the acquisition, Fortinet was already well-established in securing the network perimeter, endpoints, and on-premises infrastructure. However, as organizations migrate to the cloud, the need for integrated security solutions that span both cloud and on-premises environments has never been more critical. Lacework's focus on cloud-native security completes Fortinet's offering by extending its capabilities into the cloud and ensuring a unified security posture.

With Lacework (now FortiCNAPP) as part of the Fortinet family, customers can leverage interactions with Fortinet's security portfolio, which, combined with FortiCNAPP's existing capabilities, provides enhanced threat prevention and detection in the cloud.  The intelligence integration from FortiGuard offers enhanced visibility and awareness of the latest threats, including the latest malware, up-to-date IP reputation information, and malicious URL and domain information, which can enrich the data collection within FortiCNAPP.  In addition, integrations with FortiSOAR and FortiSIEM provide alert enrichment, automated response, and remediation across multiple Fortinet solutions, including Fortigate (firewall rule blocks) and FortiEDR (host quarantine). Finally, the integration with Fortianalyzer allows for the same level of event correlation and analysis for cloud assets as exists for on-premises infrastructure.  This integrated approach ensures consistent policy enforcement, threat detection, and incident response across the network, endpoint and cloud environments.

Enhanced Cloud Visibility and Threat Detection

Lacework brings deep visibility into cloud workloads, applications, and network traffic, which is essential for understanding and securing dynamic, distributed environments. While Fortinet excels at securing network traffic, Lacework adds another layer of visibility, enabling Fortinet's security fabric to extend into cloud-based systems and containers.

Lacework's behavioral analytics capabilities allow it to detect anomalous activity in cloud environments that might indicate an emerging attack. This complements Fortinet's existing threat detection tools by adding a cloud-specific layer of intelligence that looks for abnormal behavior in workloads, containers, and serverless functions.

By combining Fortinet's network-centric threat intelligence with Lacework's cloud-native anomaly detection, customers benefit from a holistic, multi-layered approach to threat detection that spans the entire security stack.

Automated Compliance and Risk Management

Compliance remains a top concern for businesses using cloud environments, especially when dealing with sensitive data or operating in regulated industries. FortiCNAPP automates identifying cloud resources and configurations, ensuring they adhere to industry best practices and regulatory requirements, and providing near real-time assessments of compliance gaps. 

By integrating Lacework's cloud security capabilities with Fortinet's existing compliance tools, customers can streamline audits, mitigate risks, and ensure that their on-premises and cloud environments fully comply with GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS regulations.

Integrated Security Automation

Automation is a critical component of modern security solutions. Fortinet has long been a leader in security automation with its FortiOS operating system and integration with Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tools. Lacework's cloud security platform adds another layer of automation, particularly around security configuration management, vulnerability detection, and incident response. 

FortiCNAPP provides an integrated solution for automating security workflows across cloud and network environments. This reduces the manual effort required by security teams and accelerates incident response times, making it easier for organizations to secure their entire infrastructure.

Conclusion

The acquisition of Lacework, now called FortiCNAPP, is a strategic move by Fortinet to complete its cloud security portfolio and offer customers a unified, end-to-end security solution for both on-premises and cloud environments. FortiCNAPP's advanced cloud visibility, anomaly detection, and compliance monitoring capabilities complement Fortinet's robust network security and threat intelligence solutions, allowing customers to safeguard their cloud-native workloads, secure their networks, and maintain compliance with regulatory standards—all from a single, integrated platform. 

As cloud adoption continues to accelerate, Fortinet's acquisition of Lacework positions the company as a leader in providing holistic, scalable, and automated security solutions that meet the needs of modern enterprises operating in complex multi-cloud environments. This acquisition strengthens Fortinet's ability to provide businesses with the tools they need to stay secure as they navigate the challenges of the cloud era. 

Contact your dedicated WWT account team or one of our experts to learn more about how FortiCNAPP can improve your cloud security initiatives.